How Do You Know When To Use Dashes

There used to be a real me but i had it surgically removed peter sellers 1925 1980 note.

How do you know when to use dashes. The most common types of dashes are the en dash and the em dash. Parentheses are the quiet whisper of an aside commas are the conversational voice of a friend walking by your desk and dashes are the yowl of a pirate dashing into a fray. Dashes like commas semicolons colons ellipses and parentheses indicate added emphasis an interruption or an abrupt change of thought. Dashes are punctuation marks used to set off non essential information to loosely connect two thoughts or to mark a break in the sentence. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause.

Overusing dashes can break up the flow of your writing making it choppy or even difficult to follow so don t overdo it. An em dash also called a long dash or thick dash is approximately the width of the letter m which is where it earns its name. You have to use an em dash when crediting. Em dashes are the width of you guessed it a capital m. To start with just the first item on that list we can.

There are three forms of dashes. Let s start with those quiet parentheses. It s also important to distinguish between dashes and hyphens. The first thing to know when talking about dashes is that they are almost never required by the laws of grammar and punctuation. Using dashes to credit quotations you can use an em dash to credit a quote to someone.

What is an em dash and when should you use it. Note how dashes subtly change the tone of the following sentences. Use a dash to prepare for a list a restatement an amplification or a dramatic shift in tone or thought. Em en and the double hyphen. To properly use a dash in an english sentence start by identifying which dash you should use.

You use them to surround something that seems a bit out of place in the sentence an aside a clarification or a commentary. A good way to remember the difference between these two dashes is to visualize the en dash as the length of the letter n and the em dash as the length of the letter m. It s an em dash before peter sellers and an en dash between 1925 and 1980 note. In general you can think of parentheses commas and dashes as a continuum of marks. Place em dashes around non essential information or a list in the middle of a sentence like you would with commas.