largely undefined. Sometimes it indicates an afterthought. Other times, it’s a fist pump. You might call it
the bad boy, or cool girl, of punctuation. A freewheeling scofflaw. A rebel without a clause.
Martha Nell Smith, a professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of five books on
poet Emily Dickinson (the original em dash obsessive), says that Dickinson used the dash to “highlight the
ambiguity of the written word”.
“The dash is an invitation to the reader to make meaning,” Nell Smith says. “It can also be a leap of faith.”
Grammarians don’t necessarily see it that way. Mary Norris, the New Yorker’s “Comma Queen” and the
author of Between You and Me, a foray into all manner of spelling and punctuation issues, says the em dash
“can be substituted for almost any other mark of punctuation: the comma, the semicolon, the colon, the
period, a pair of parentheses, the quotation mark, even a bullet point in the making of a list”. Just don’t use
more than two in a sentence, according to some experts.
There are few things more beautiful than a strategically placed em dash
The informal em dash also lends itself to the rapid, fragmented pace of digital communication. As such, it
has begun popping up in texts, tweets and even Tinder messages.
“It’s this great piece of punctuation that gets at the emphasis of how people really talk,” says Rachel
Holliday Smith, a reporter for New York paper The City and an active participant in em dash Twitter.
Cecelia Watson, the author of Semicolon, a guide to that punctuation mark’s correct usage, says it has a kind
of “urgency to it, almost like a little arrow that’s missing its arrowhead. It has that businessy but also breezy
look to it. Nobody really gets intimidated by a dash.”
Which is why the em dash appears in so many contexts: lyrical fiction, news briefs, movie titles. It can sit at
any table in the cafeteria. Whereas the hyphen and en dash (a mid-length dash, roughly the length of the
letter n, commonly used to indicate range) have specific use cases, the em dash contains multitudes.
Despite its popularity, the em dash is often
used incorrectly (iStock)But not everyone is a fan. Online, opinions abound about how and when one ought to use the thin
horizontal line. The takes can be surprisingly emotional.
When the author Alexander Chee recently tweeted: “Em-dash is the ‘just belt it and go’ of punctuation.
Thus my devotion to it,” he inspired replies from legions of devotees.
Earlier this year, the writer Laura van den Berg confessed in her own tweet that “after years of resistance”