Ah, yes, the subtleties of writing.
I make my fair share of grammar and spelling mistakes. Strike that. I make more than my fair share of grammar and spelling mistakes. As Editor of ChurchMag, mechanics is not my strong suit. I find plenty of errors, usually posts not written by me, but as for a squeaky grammar publication, ChurchMag is not. What makes matters worse, is that I may be the worst offender. Thankfully, we’re pretty informal as we present our information; but that doesn’t mean that I, or we, don’t care about our grammar and spelling!
So, as I corrected another instance of an en dash being used instead of an em dash, let me pass my knowledge along to you.
What Are These Dashes You Speak Of?
This is a real subtlety, but once you’ve got this figured out, you’ll be glad you learned it.
- Hyphen: –
- En Dash: –
- Em Dash: —
En Dash
An easy way to remember the en dash, is that it’s about the same width as the letter n and is a little longer than a hyphen (as you can see above). Most people who write just use the hyphen and call it good. Use an en dash when you would normally use the word, to.
Example
- The years 2011–2013
- January–June
An en dash is can also be used in place of a hyphen when combining open compounds:
Example
- North Carolina–Virginia border (Where I used to live.)
- A high school–college youth conference
Got it? Cool.
Em Dash
With the em dash, you can remember it by the fact that it’s the width of an m. Although not used formally, they are used to replace commas, semicolons, colons, and parentheses to add emphasis, interruption or a sudden change of thought.
Example
- You are the friend—the only friend—who offered to help me.
- Never have I met such a lovely person—before you.
- I need three items at the store—dog food, vegetarian chili, and cheddar cheese.
- My agreement with Fiona is clear—she teaches me French and I teach her German.
- Please call my agent—Jessica Cohen—about hiring me.
- I wish you would—oh, never mind.
You’ll notice that for both the en dash and em dash, there is not space a space between the dash and the words they are separating.
How to Type Them
En Dash
With a PC, hit the hyphen key twice, and your program should convert it.
Mac users, press option/alt and your hyphen key.
Em Dash
With a PC, hold down the ALT key while typing 0151 on the ten key of your keyboard.
Mac users, hold down the option/alt key and shift key, and press your hyphen key.
To form an em dash on most PCs, type the first word, then hold down the ALT key while typing 0151 on the numerical pad on the right side of your keyboard. Then type the second word. You may also form an em dash by typing the first word, hitting the hyphen key twice, and then typing the second word. Your program will turn the two hyphens into an em dash for you.
How to Become a Better Writer
My personal strategy to becoming a better writer has been to, well, write.
Obsessing over every little detail will only lead to discouragement and a dead blog (if that’s your venue). Any time I come across a grammar rule or punctuation instance that comes into question—whether it be writing or reading—I Google it. Pretty heavy intel, I know. It’s like the pro-tip of the decade; but seriously. Once I’ve Googled it, I probably end up Googling it again three or four times before I’ve memorized the rule. It’s not an easy process, but it’s slam-dunk successful. As for spelling, that just takes practice. My biggest errors are due to not using spell check or not proof reading my there’s, their’s, and painful type-uh-oh’s. Practice does make perfect when it comes to spelling. So be patient.
In the future, I may share a little of what I’ve learned—like I just did—what do you think about that?
[via GrammarBook.com]
Michael John Beil says
Keep writing these.
Eric Dye says
Okay. 🙂
Jared says
Very helpful post! I learned the differences and uses of these in design school. Never knew the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac though. Thanks for posting!
Eric Dye says
Awesome! Yeah, they’re pretty easy on a Mac, something that you can easily get in a habit of doing. 😀
Kenny Jahng says
Nice piece and keep them coming.
I just had an EM DASH issue with a client this past week. The question is how slavishly we should follow such grammar rules when designing and writing for web, mobile and even certain print collateral scenarios.
A similar rule of concern is the period. How do you treat a sentence with a URL at the end of it? Proper grammar requires a period and the end. But putting a period could mislead readers and when they use the URL as printed — with a period — they will get a 404 Error page. To get around this, one option is to rewrite the call to action sentence so that it ends with a colon and then the URL, so that no period is needed at the end. But that shouldn’t be the only way to handle a URL at the end of a sentence, right?
Kenny
Eric Dye says
When I am writing in a more formal setting or trying to follow the proper rules, I usually include it like such:
“Thank you for reading ChurchMag (https://churchm.ag).”
Placing the URL in parentheses is what I’ve done, crafting the language for it to make the most sense.
Chris Ridgeway says
Rules are made to be broken! Lots of these kind of things are style manual choices, not had and fast things like subject-verb agreement. I think em-dashes are perfectly appropriate in professional writing or journalism, despite what some grammar rule books may say. Both AP Style and Chicago Style treat how to use em-dashes.
I also think they can equally serve in print or web, depending on context. In some cases they’re definitely better. They tend to be more visually scannable vs offset commas, for example.
Chris Ridgeway says
As I writer, I can’t live without my em dash!
When I had a PC, in Word, you can change the settings to map it to a more common key (so you’re not doing alt-# combos: wow, that’s an old ASCII hold-over).
With the rise in common usage, I’m hoping the em dash gets a promotion on the standard keyboard at some point.
Eric Dye says
Come to think of it, I believe it was one of your submitted blog posts that peaked my interest in all this en dash, em dash mumbo-jumbo. Thank you for the inspiration! 😀
Chris Ridgeway says
Nice! (missed this comment before.)
Eric Dye says
You’re such a pro. 😉