Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen
This guide and most guides like it tend to miss the most important and powerful use of the em-dash and make it out like you can use it for anything but really they are just missing the wonderful simplicity of the em-dash and how versatile that simplicity is. The em-dash raises and lowers the narrative voice. In fiction this provides a way to provide insight into the narrator; an em-dash tells us we are switching from the story the narrator is telling us to the thoughts of the narrator, a second em-dash or a period lowers the voice back down to the story the narrator is conveying. This is the sense of dialog being introduced with em-dashes instead of being quoted, a new line starting with an em-dash lowers the narrative voice, narrator hands story off to character.<p>The simplified rules for the em-dash are pretty much intuited and prescribed versions of this which gut the effectiveness of em-dash. In general use an em-dash should be used to denote thoughts without having too restructure&#x2F;delete what you just wrote to accommodate that thought.<p>Edit: I oversimplified. Consistency is what is important, using an em-dash like a comma that isn&#x27;t a comma leads to ambiguity when you also use commas. A writer who avoids semicolons and quotes all dialog can use an em-dash very differently than raising the voice, but they can also use a semi-colon very differently than its standard accepted role, that is what these simple guides miss, the consistency of usage, they just list all of the various ways you could use any given mark and people start using an em-dash to &quot;fix&quot; their long run-on sentence with all of its commas.<p>The closest thing we have to standard use allows for wonderfully complex sentences which can convey great meaning but consistent and well defined use is most important.<p>comma - connects independent and dependent clauses<p>em-dash - raises and lowers the voice<p>semicolon - connects independent clauses in a more direct way than the paragraph<p>colon - elaborates an idea<p>parenthesis - an aside, stated instead of thought<p>period - end of thought<p>Question mark and exclamation points do not need to be at the end of a sentence, they can double as comma, semicolon, or colon.<p>I seem to be missing a nuance of HN&#x27;s line breaks and formatting.