How To Use Dashes Grammar

Place em dashes around non essential information or a list in the middle of a sentence like you would with commas.

How to use dashes grammar. 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. Both dashes do exactly the same thing. A single dash can emphasize material at the beginning or end of a sentence. Those long straight lines draw your eye and hold your attention. Generally speaking the dash does not have a unique role.

Think of dashes as the opposite of parentheses. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. To set off material for emphasis. The em dash is the largest of the three kinds of dashes. Which you see most will depend on where what you re reading was originally published.

After eighty years of dreaming the elderly man realized it was time to finally revisit the land of his youth ireland. Short dashes technically en dashes aren t as showy as their wider cousins but they re still useful. The most common types of dashes are the en dash and the em dash. It is used in the same manner as a parenthetical expression. Rather than placing parentheses around a phrase within a statement writers can opt to surround the phrase with an em dash on either end.

A dash can be used to add emphasis at the beginning middle or end of a sentence. It is usually used as an alternative to another type of punctuation. Spacing with punctuation periods commas semicolons colons question marks parentheses and brackets apostrophes hyphens dashes ellipses quotation marks exclamation points slashes. When used to extend a sentence a dash can replace a semicolon a colon or three dots used as a pause for effect. Dashes are often used to signal an abrupt change in a sentence indicating that the reader should pay close attention to what comes next.

They insert information into a sentence and introduce lists. Rules for using dashes. Dashes like commas semicolons colons ellipses and parentheses indicate added emphasis an interruption or an abrupt change of thought. Use a longer em dash to join independent clauses with words like and but as or and for. At emphasis we use the shorter en dash as it s used most extensively in british english and we re based in great britain.