How Do You Know When To Use Dashes

Dashes like commas semicolons colons ellipses and parentheses indicate added emphasis an interruption or an abrupt change of thought.

How do you know when to use dashes. The reason for using an en dash with such compounds is to send a subtle signal to the reader that the prefix belongs to the entire compound not just the first word of it. To properly use a dash in an english sentence start by identifying which dash you should use. It s an em dash before peter sellers and an en dash between 1925 and 1980 note. Place em dashes around non essential information or a list in the middle of a sentence like you would with commas. Dashes are used to separate groups of words not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does.

You use them to surround something that seems a bit out of place in the sentence an aside a clarification or a commentary. Dashes are punctuation marks used to set off non essential information to loosely connect two thoughts or to mark a break in the sentence. Em dashes are the width of you guessed it a capital m. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. Dashes are often used to signal an abrupt change in a sentence indicating that the reader should pay close attention to what comes next.

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. What is an em dash and when should you use 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. In general you can think of parentheses commas and dashes as a continuum of marks. Let s start with those quiet parentheses.

The most common types of dashes are the en dash and the em dash. Using dashes to credit quotations you can use an em dash to credit a quote to someone. It s also important to distinguish between dashes and hyphens. The vegetarian gasped in horror when he saw lining the wall of the cabin a collection of animal heads moose deer bears squirrels all dead. Most often they re used in pairs to emphasize an element or elements within a sentence.

Overusing dashes can break up the flow of your writing making it choppy or even difficult to follow so don t overdo it. There are three forms of dashes. Experienced writers know that these marks are not interchangeable. The first thing to know when talking about dashes is that they are almost never required by the laws of grammar and punctuation. A dash can be used to add emphasis at the beginning middle or end of a.