Grammar Saves Lives, Part One

As promised last week, here is the first of a series of grammar blog posts by my editor. Last week, I asked for suggestions, and Dana came up with a good one – the difference between n-dashes and m-dashes and when to use which (thank you, Dana!). Thanks to time constraints, she chose this one; that’s ok, she’ll do my topics too, eventually (and some day really soon she’ll finish editing my next book so that I can publish it – right, Nina!?).

     So, without further ado, take it away, Nina! 

(and hyphen)

Today, we’re going to kick off the grammar series with something easy and simple – en-dashes and em-dashes.

(See what I did there?)

Dashes save lives. I mean, which would you rather hear about – the man eating shark at the table to your left, or the man-eating shark right behind you? Think about it.

First off is en-dashes. They’re the really easy one, just a single tap of the “-“ key on your keyboard. (That’s why they’re called “n”, as supposed to “m” – they’re about half the size of em-dashes.) En-dashes are usually used just for technical things.

-  Use the en-dash to replace the word “to” or “through” in intervals, like when you’re talking about a span of years or page numbers. Don’t use it when it’s “from … to …”, though; that’s just getting into over-abbreviation.

President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 (Carter 93-4).

-  Use the en-dash to show a relationship between two things, or to hyphenate separate ideas.

A major achievement in the pre-Civil War era was the Maryland-Illinois route called Cumberland Road, or the “All-American Road”.

-  Use an en-dash the same way you’d use a hyphen –

Put two words together, like above in “All-American” – or like the word “en-dash” itself!
Split a word in half so that it looks bet-

ter justified.
Split up a word into syl-la-bles, or spell it O-U-T.
Modify words, like something spine-tingling. Make sure to use a hyphen when it marks a difference between a verb and an adjective – think back to the man-eating shark. Who’s eating whom?
Connect numbers to their units: a five-foot-five, 125-pound, twenty-year-old woman.
My favorite use of a hyphen is a hanging hyphen, which you use when you have more than one hyphenated word with the same base, like when I talk about en- and em-dashes.

-  Use en-dashes for bullets in a list, like this one!

Then there’s em-dashes. These are the long ones, about the length of the letter “m” in most typefaces. Em-dashes can often replace other punctuation marks, so they’re mainly stylistic.

-  You can use an em-dash to replace an ellipsis (. . .) at the end of dialogue, when someone is cut off. It makes it more abrupt – cut off rather than trailing off – so it’s good for someone stopping short or being interrupted.

“Go away, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what? Kick me out?”

-  You could also use it to replace a colon, a semicolon, or a comma, for a more abrupt end to a sentence.

They didn’t agree then – not then, and not ever again.

-  Use an em-dash to attribute quotes.

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. – Dorothy Parker

Now, there’s one use that you may have noticed I left out: parentheticals. Dashes are perhaps most often used to insert offhand ideas – like this – in the middle of a sentence, replacing parentheses. It’s not a hard use to understand; the only reason I left it for last is because you can use both en- and em-dashes for these. This is just a stylistic difference: use an en-dash enclosed in spaces, an em-dash enclosed in spaces, or an em-dash without spaces depending on what you feel looks best. The only thing is to make sure you’re consistent about it!

Now, one more thing to recall – now that you know how to use dashes, it’s going to be hard to resist sprinkling them all over the place! They can be distracting, though, and there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. So, be careful. I swear, half of my job is going through all of Merry’s dashes and replacing them with colons or semicolons or commas. (Not to mention, I used seven em-dashes in this 600-word blog!)

So that’s dashes! Use ’em well, use ’em right. I hope you enjoyed this first installment of the series! Any requests for next time?