
Regarding the Em Dash - samclemens
https://themillions.com/2018/01/regarding-the-em-dash.html
======
OliverJones
I learned old-school printing in high school. We had a press with a flatbed
and screw. More to the point, we had lower and upper cases filled with steel
type, including lots of different dashes and spaces. Our teacher was a
traditionalist. He taught us such things as how to justify a line of type.
Narrowing a line involved switching "thicks" (nominal space slugs) for
"middles" in an artful way. Widening it involved switching thicks for two
"thins", and so forth.

We had plenty of dash characters--we had hyphens of course, and figure dashes,
and en dashes, and em dashes. Figure dashes are one en in width, with the
vertical position of the visible element is designed to match the numerals in
the font. This let us set a sentence like so with subtle perfection.

Type designer John Baskerville (1706-1775) owned a printing-works and type
foundry in Manchester.

Does anybody notice this sort of thing? Probably nobody except book designers.
Does anybody care? Well, my mom said she cared when I pointed it out to her.

From that teacher I learned to respect the choices of the type designer and
how to use those choices. His tradition--now mine--dictates that all these
dashes be typeset closed, without leading or trailing spaces. In the OpenType
era, a type designer may choose to leave a speck of white space around a dash,
but it's up to the designer, not the typesetter.

Text rendering in software like web browsers and word processors is gradually
catching up to the tradition. Adobe's InDesign product does a great job of all
this. Recent versions of MS Word are great improvements.

It helps to know the HTML entities for these items if you'll play around with
them in your web pages.

    
    
        &mdash;   em-dash
        &ndash;   en-dash
        &#8210;   figure dash (using en-dash is mostly acceptabe).
        &#8209;   non-breaking hyphen
        &emsp;    one em of space
        &ensp;    one en of space
        &nbsp;    the much-misused nonbreaking space (use an en space for &nbsp;&nbsp ktksbai)
        &thinsp;  thin space (0.2-0.25em)

~~~
leephillips
People who use [La]TeX tend to become a bit obsessive over typographic
details, as well. What do you think of that program? (Very interesting
comment, by the way.)

~~~
lstamour
The hardest part about using LaTeX is getting to the realisation that to
replicate InDesign, you might need OpenType support that might not ship by
default, as well as needing to run it more than once. Once you have
/latexmk.pl [1] and XeTeX [2], you can then achieve amazing results [3] with
the right modules and some creativity. It's just not quite as fluid to use as
InDesign for graphically-minded people.

1: [https://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexmk](https://ctan.org/tex-
archive/support/latexmk)

2:
[http://nitens.org/taraborelli/TeXOpenType](http://nitens.org/taraborelli/TeXOpenType)

3: [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-
bea...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-
typography-done-in-tex-friends)

~~~
leephillips
Or you can use make, or a bash script. OpenType support has been standard for
years; the preferred engine is LuaLaTeX:
[https://lwn.net/Articles/731581/](https://lwn.net/Articles/731581/)

------
combatentropy
The em dash is the most beautiful punctuation mark, all the more because it is
rare --- and it is best kept that way. Certainly a sentence with more than two
is imparsible. In fact, more than a few in a whole article is probably getting
annoying. It's like the exclamation point in that way.

Once you discover the em dash, it is hard to restrain yourself. But I'm trying
to come back to the comma. It does its work without fanfare, almost invisibly.
The mature writer realizes his job is to tell the reader something without
getting in the way.

I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash.
Unconventionally, I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens.
The traditional two aren't long enough. But two is better than one. I always
have to reread sentences by someone who thinks the hyphen and the dash are the
same thing.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash.

Horrible; if you are going to set a dash open and use it for the purpose of an
em-dash, use an en-dash.

Setting an em-dash open is ugly as hell.

> I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens.

Two-hyphens is conventional for an en-dash. Since a set-open en-dash serves
the same purposes as an em-dash, a lot of people just use that instead of the
three-hyphen conventional encoding of an em-dash.

Some people use set-open hyphens on ASCII in place of dashes, which is
actually probably the best thing in a monospace presentation but ugly in
proportional fonts.

~~~
quietbritishjim
>> I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash.

> Horrible;

I strongly disagree. A closed em-dash—like this—looks jarringly like the words
either side of it are closely related, as if by an extra-long hyphen. For
example, in t previous sentence, “this—looks” visually appears to me to be a
single compound entity, which is ironic considering that the intention was to
make them appear especially separated. The ideal spacing is a thin space on
each side, but I find a full space totally acceptable.

Of course, worst of all is asymmetric spacing, like this— yuk.

Edit: I just realised a closed em-dash doesn't look too bad in these comments
because there is a very slight space either side of it, but I still stand by
the above. A closed em-dash is much worse in documents typeset in TeX, where
the dash without manual spacing practically touches the letters either side of
it.

~~~
Udo_Schmitz
Hackernews defaults to Verdana—a known terrible font-design. Dashes should be
visibly thinner than hyphens. And the reply-box is in monospace, so I can't
see difference between the en- and the em-dash. In German we use the en-dash
with leading and trailing space instead of the em-dash.

~~~
steamer25
If anyone else was surprised as I was to hear that Verdana was disliked,
here's the most compelling argument I found against it:

While it was meticulously designed for on-screen legibility, these days higher
resolution screens and anti-aliasing, etc. are a better solution than meddling
with the letter shapes e.g., taller x-heights, bigger openings, etc.

One detractor did allow for Verdana when rendering fine-print/legalese at very
small font sizes--as long as it was unlikely to be printed.

~~~
dragonwriter
Verdana was exquisitely well designed for the special problem of on-screen
readability on the kind of screens that dominated in the mid-1990s, but, yeah,
it's not 1996 any more.

On most screens these days, you are probably better off, if using a font of
Verdana’s vintage or older, using one optimized for _print_ legibility.

------
jasoncrawford
Tip: On a Mac, you can type an em-dash with shift-option-hyphen. (An en-dash
is just option-hyphen.)

~~~
gk1
There are a few reasons why I switched from PC to Mac, but there's only one
reason I'll never switch back—it's this em-dash shortcut.

~~~
alanfalcon
I had to program this and other special characters—notably •, ™, and ®—as an
autohotkey script on my work PC. I was going insane. I already had autohotkey
going to reverse the direction of Windows’ stubbon backwards scroll anyway.
(Once I used so-called “natural scrolling” for a week it became impossible to
understand why anyone would choose anything else.)

~~~
ScottBurson
When you move your eyes downward, the world seems to move up. Do you therefore
call that "looking up"?

~~~
alanfalcon
No. I’d get dizzy real fast if that very natural association between movement
and perception were suddenly reversed though. (Somehow that didn’t happen when
I started using natural scrolling, only when trying to go back from it.)

------
bmpafa
As someone who takes flak from literati friends for his em dashin', this is a
vindicating find—(!)thanks, OP.

I learned to use em dashes in the military on our performance reports (sort of
like an annual resume with a grade attached).

For a few (dubious) reasons, every bullet had to be precisely 1 line long,
+/\- 0-3 spaces at EOL (we had almost as many rules regarding these bullets as
we did the other kind, it seemed).

Since we had a lot of (usually somewhat independent) points to jam into 1
line, we often had lots of separate clauses with a period, semi-colon[1], or
em dash. The em dash always seemed to fill precisely the correct amount of
space.

1:
[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon)

------
Vinnl
I guess the Em Dash is like the Kurwa of punctuation:

> The most common curse word in Polish is kurwa, which can mean a variety of
> things - damn, bitch, fuck, {insert any word}, and can even serve as a
> comma.

[https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Polish_phrasebook#Phrase_list](https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Polish_phrasebook#Phrase_list)

------
pavel_lishin
Maybe I'm weirdly old fashioned, but I try to stick to ascii whenever possible
- which means whatever character is stuck in the middle of this sentence.
Ditto for the ellipsis, since it's not like three trailing periods at the end
of a sentence can be mistaken for anything else...

~~~
pacaro
This is a great example of how limiting ASCII is. It doesn’t even contain the
full set of punctuation that correct (!) English requires. It supposes that
you are satisfied using ' for both ‘ and ’, and " for both “ and ”, and
eliminates all the dashes for the hyphen—which has to play double duty as a
minus sign.

It also eliminate dieresis from the language, naive not naïve, and strips all
accents from loan words

~~~
dredmorbius
Question is: how much charactersetting is enough, and how much is too much?

I've been kicking around thoughts on Unicode and various codepoints, and which
really ought or ought not be used.

It is decidedly complex. I've got in mind a simplified coding, though, for
common interchange formats. Effectively a glyphic pidgen. Presuming "glyphic"
is a word.

(1913 Webster says it is. Hurrah!)

------
weeksie
I used to be an em dash over-user but have calmed down quite a bit in that
department over the last several years. My current idée fixe is the archaic
ellipsis as (over) used by Céline . . . I just can't bring myself to go with
the single character scrunchy version.

~~~
dfee
Ah man, … as a single character is the best. I believe on a Mac it’s shift-
alt-;

I’m on my iPhone right now so I can’t verify my muscle memory.

~~~
erichurkman
Easier: … is ⌥+;

Shift+Alt+; is Ú

~~~
dfee
You're right. It's actually just alt+;

------
pseingatl
For dialog, as used by James Joyce, or in typesetting other languages such as
Spanish, French and Polish, the em dash (U+2014) is not used, but the
quotation dash is (U+2015). The quotation dash is a bit longer. See,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash).

------
the_af
Philip K Dick, one of my favorite authors, used the em dash a great deal. In
fact, I think I first noticed it in his stories. Without having been taught
how to use o read it, I immediately understood PKD's intent -- and how the
dash wasn't exactly _necessary_ for anything but flavor. A mimic of other
punctuation marks is an apt description!

I've been abusing the em dash since.

------
ianamartin
The only thing that disappointed me about this article was that there wasn't
enough David Foster Wallace.

But perhaps the author is saving that for an article about footnotes.

------
pash
The em-dash is like the AK-47: it feels good in one’s own hand, but one is
distressed to find it everywhere one looks. If you find yourself wielding
either often, you should stop and ask yourself: “Am I the bad guy?”

Just minutes ago I read two articles demonstrating the horror of a world awash
in em-dashes, both in _The New York Times_ [0, 1]. One may empathize with the
writers, if one is so inclined: they have employed em-dashes for emphasis, to
insert asides, and to lend needed structure to their sentences. But I think
one should not be so sympathetic, because they’ve used 19 of the damn things
(!), and every usage would arguably be improved by substituting another form
of punctuation or by restructuring the sentence in a way that eliminates the
need for complex punctuation entirely.

The ugliest em-dash is in the second sentence of the first article:

 _> A new class of security vulnerability — a variety of flaws that affect
almost all major microprocessor chips, and that could enable hackers to steal
information from personal computers as well as cloud computing services — was
announced on Wednesday._

This is an abomination. The writer has needlessly separated the sentence’s
subject and predicate by two em-dashes and 28 words in two phrases, burdening
the reader with the task of untangling her mess. Did neither she nor her
editor care enough about the reader to re-write the sentence trivially in a
natural way? Try this:

 _A new class of security vulnerability was announced on Wednesday, a variety
of flaws that affect almost all major microprocessor chips. The flaws could
enable hackers to steal information from personal computers as well as cloud
computing services._

This use of a double em-dash to insert additional information mid-sentence is
almost always the wrong thing to do. Here’s another example from the second
article:

 _> Over the next few years, hundreds of millions of dollars in American
deposits flowed from Swiss banking stalwarts — institutions like Credit Suisse
and Julius Baer — to Bank Frey._

I propose instead:

 _Over the next few years, hundreds of millions of dollars in American
deposits flowed to Bank Frey from Swiss banking stalwarts like Credit Suisse
and Julius Baer._

If you find yourself using em-dashes like this, pause and ask yourself why you
can’t render the sentence more naturally. Most times you can, whether by
restructuring the sentence, by using standard appositive phrases set off by
commas, or by true parentheticals (preferably at the end of the sentence, not
dividing the subject and predicate). If you can’t make that work, consider
separating the information you wish to convey into two or more sentences.

Here are some more examples of what not to do. From the second article:

 _> And since the problem is built into the hardware — billions of chips that
cannot easily be replaced — fixing this class of problems may also be
prohibitively expensive._

Just replace “hardware” with the more detailed phrase and a comma: “... since
the problem is built into billions of chips that cannot easily be replaced,
fixing ...”

From the second article:

 _> She would return to the United States secretly carrying just under $10,000
in cash — the cutoff for having to make a customs declaration._

Just use a fucking comma!

Now, if you’ll give me a moment to collect myself in the face of all of this
grammatical turpitude, I will say that there are two usages of the em-dash in
these articles that I do think sensible. Both set off information in ways that
other forms of punctuation can’t (except for the venerable parentheses), and
they do so in ways that don’t interrupt the logical flow of the sentence:

 _> A common trick involves having the microprocessor predict what the program
is about to do and start doing it before it has been asked to do it — say,
fetching data from memory._

 _> Prosecutors said all the secrecy — the nameless debit cards, the scissored
bank paperwork, the shadowy phone calls — showed Mr. Buck knew what he was
doing was wrong._

TLDR: if you use em-dashes often, you might be a lazy writer with a bad
editor.

———

0\. “The looming digital meltdown,”
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/looming-
digital-m...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/looming-digital-
meltdown.html)

1\. “A Swiss banker helped Americans dodge taxes. Was it a crime?”,
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/stefan-buck-
tax-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/stefan-buck-tax-
evasion.html)

~~~
combatentropy
Midsentence injection deserves its own thread. Is it a trend, or am I just
noticing it more? It's hard on the brain, because you have to hold the first
part of the sentence in memory while you take in the interruption. Your
example is great, the one about the security vulnerability. Your revisions are
much better in all cases.

It's actually my first impulse to inject these midsentence clauses. Is it
because of a short attention span, or is it a fear of someone raising an
objection if I don't qualify every statement?

~~~
pash
I do it too, when I’m being lazy. It simply requires more effort to order
one’s thoughts well.

The best reference on style I know in this regard is Joseph Williams’s book
_Style: Toward Clarity and Grace_ [0]. The book explains how to analyze your
own writing to lessen the mental burden on the reader, mainly by re-writing
your sentences so that there is a natural logical flow from subject to
predicate to object, with detail added in phrases that don’t get in the way.

0\.
[https://sites.duke.edu/niou/files/2014/07/WilliamsJosephM199...](https://sites.duke.edu/niou/files/2014/07/WilliamsJosephM1990StyleTowardClarityandGrace.pdf)
[PDF]

------
cup-of-tea
I know this because I've read Knuth's The TeXbook. I learnt so much about
typography from that book. And yes I did find several places to use an em dash
in my PhD thesis.

------
seandougall
Am I the only curmudgeon who can’t get past the extra space after periods in a
post about punctuation?

~~~
bmpafa
Nope. Raging against double-spaces post-period was all the rage a few years
back[1], so I'm sure it raises quite a few curmudgeonly hackles.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html)

~~~
KC8ZKF
I am an unapologetic curmudgeon who uses two spaces. Or rather, my right thumb
does. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, I use mostly mono-spaced fonts,
and two spaces after a full stop makes perfect sense. I went thirty years
between learning it and thinking about it, and then some point-and-drool twee
bloggers made it unfashionable.

~~~
CharlesW
> _I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, I use mostly mono-spaced fonts, and
> two spaces after a full stop makes perfect sense._

It's still considered fine to do that when using monospaced fonts, just as
using the prime symbol (') instead of an apostrophe (’) won't raise any
eyebrows in that scenario.

When your goal is to make something that looks like it was typeset by someone
with an awareness of typographical conventions, then understanding those can
be helpful. ("Twee bloggers" didn't invent them.)

~~~
KC8ZKF
"When your goal is to make something that looks like it was typeset by someone
with an awareness of typographical conventions..."

If by that you mean typesetting, I agree. Typing and typesetting are two
different activities.

LaTex, for example, will typeset both ".(one space)" and ".(two spaces)" into
the same white space that is somewhat larger than one typed space and somewhat
smaller than two.

~~~
CharlesW
> _If by that you mean typesetting, I agree. Typing and typesetting are two
> different activities._

Exactly, and many (non-developer) folks may not have ever experienced the "two
spaces after sentences" convention if they haven't sat in a typing class with
old-school typewriters, and haven't been instructed on formatting monospaced
type.

------
kevmo314
> Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas,
> parentheses, or colons—in each case to slightly different effect.” The
> “slightly different” part is, to me, the em dash’s appeal summarized.

For me, it's of the opposite. It's like using `auto` too universally in C++:
sometimes it's helpful to know the type you actually intend. Although I cede
that the overuse in the article is more likely because it's discussing it and
making a whimsical point. :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Commas also can take the place of parentheses and, sometimes, colons.
Punctuation is like sentence structure in general, adaptable.

~~~
alanfalcon
Sure, they can (but should they?)

------
wiradikusuma
I use mdash for "side thoughts", such as:

It turned green—like I care.

He kicked that person's butt—quite hard actually—without thinking of the
repercussions.

~~~
radmarshallb
I tend to use parentheses in the way that it appears most people are using the
emdash (like in your second example).

------
cryptonector
Yes! I use em dashes quite often. I _tire_ of commas and parenthesis. I do
prefer two short dashes together, because I enjoy ASCII. I also use short
dashes as parenthesis sometimes, -like this-, but this doesn't always work
well as some UIs use that for strikethrough.

EDIT: Do please put whitespace around em dashes.

~~~
krsdcbl
To your edit: i wouldn't recommend, the EM dash should generally be used
without surrounding spaces.

It is dimensioned to set a proper pause in the text and will rip holes in your
text body if surrounded by so much additional white space.

You also wouldn't put a space before a period . (Use an EN dash with spaces,
if you must)

~~~
cryptonector
[http://apvschicago.com/2011/05/em-dashes-and-ellipses-
closed...](http://apvschicago.com/2011/05/em-dashes-and-ellipses-closed-or-
spaced.html)

------
WovenTales
I love dashes. I do tend to avoid ems for parenthetical remarks – for those,
I'll use spaced ens – but I do definitely use the longer for interjections and
(roughly) semicolons, as the article describes. Where I break from convention
is that, if they're marking an interjection or other interruption, I will put
a space in on a _single_ side of the dash— like so —to better demarcate the
logical flow. Then again, I also put a thin space before exclamation points,
etc. if I can (though unlike French, nothing if I just have full spaces), so I
have other reasons to dismiss the complaints about style.

~~~
quietbritishjim
I realise this is nothing more than my opinion, but I have to tell you that
asymmetric spacing around a dash looks awful.

~~~
WovenTales
Thanks for that, actually! You're the first to comment on the aesthetics
rather than the "incorrect" usage. My thinking is that the dashes are part of
the pragmatics of the primary, wrapping phrase, and don't actually interact
with the inner one—they are therefore bound to the first and separate from the
second. Whether or not it's a good look, the fact that doing so much better
signposts the parenthetical makes it worth it, right? And that spacing rule is
actually almost the same as with ellipses, though I'm definitely with you on
that taking a while to look good to me as well.

Do you think it's just being unused to that layout, or is there some deeper
issue to how it looks?

~~~
yesenadam
There's a lot in what you say. Not crazy at all. They only looked awful for
about 10 seconds hehe. But sure, using them to help show the meaning is a good
idea. I've recently learnt to write a = b*c + d, spacing assisting clarity.
Carry on, I support you in your chosen mission.

------
calebm
This is awesome :) I've been using the em-dash a lot recently, but didn't even
know it had a name. It often seems more natural than using semicolons—
semicolons often feel more formal and cold.

~~~
ravenstine
I still prefer semicolons when connecting two related thoughts, whereas it
seems that em-dashes are most often used as a pause or a pseudo-comma. The
brilliance of the semicolon is that you can connect two or more closely
related sentences without a full stop. Em-dashes can't be used to connect
multiple complete sentences. Semicolons are really more powerful than em-
dashes, less pretty they may be.

