How To Use Dashes In Legal Writing

Here are the basics.

How to use dashes in legal writing. Use parentheses to set off matter that you want to minimize or that is helpful but not essential. It never takes a space before or after the mark. The em dash is used to make a break be tween parts of a sen tence. Dashes are used to separate groups of words not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. Our clients singh lafrance and ivanoff have sent us the documents we requested.

His neighbor with whom he had had several serious disagreements removed a section of the fence. Dashes can also be used to set off a clause parenthetical expression or list. The em dash puts a nice pause in the text and it is un der used in pro fes sional writing. Use em dashes to highlight information or give emphasis to matter that is independent of the main sentence. At some point between 1680 and 2016 i pinpoint it in 1996 nefarious forces took over in legal writing.

Both sentences should be complete and their content should be very closely related. You could use commas here instead but dashes change the emphasis b. Note that if you use colons this way too often it can break up the flow of your writing. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. Today brackets and parentheses are misused often enough to make any sensible reader.

A dash is a little horizontal line that floats in the middle of a line of text not at the bottom. Simplify your life by assigning a shortcut key to the em dash and any other symbols that you use frequently. The en dash is shorter than an em dash and longer than a hyphen. Em dashes may also be used to tack on an important afterthought at the end of a sentence. Use it when a comma is too weak but a colon semi colon or pair of paren the ses is too strong.