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Em Dash
Often when I'm coaching beginning writers, I have to stop to explain about hyphens, dashes, double dashes, "slashes", and the em and en dashes. How pleased I was to find this definition online, buried deep within one of my alma mater's websites, this one on Educational Technology. According to the Glossary of Design Terms: "Em space: a space as wide as the point size of the types. This measurement is relative; in 12-point type an em space is 12 points wide, but in 24-point type an em space is 24 points wide." An em dash takes up an em space.
This is the correct dash mark to use for material that will be printed. Although they don't refer to the em by name, Strunk & White's illustrations for using a dash are all em dashes. They say to "use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption, and to announce a long appositive or summary. A dash is a mark of separation stronger than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses." Because no one knows how to use colons anymore, I would expect to see fewer rather than more dashes, but, alas, few can write right.
In MS Word, the word processing program most often used to produce manuscripts, we find the desirable em dash by clicking on Insert > Symbols > Special Characters. If you use it often (NOT recommended) you can program a Macro (keyboard shortcut) to insert it. There should be no space on either side of the em dash. When writing for the web, the em dash is accomplished by using the code "ampersand (&), pound or number sign (#), 8212, semi-colon." [punctuation] Listen to this article
This is the correct dash mark to use for material that will be printed. Although they don't refer to the em by name, Strunk & White's illustrations for using a dash are all em dashes. They say to "use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption, and to announce a long appositive or summary. A dash is a mark of separation stronger than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses." Because no one knows how to use colons anymore, I would expect to see fewer rather than more dashes, but, alas, few can write right.In MS Word, the word processing program most often used to produce manuscripts, we find the desirable em dash by clicking on Insert > Symbols > Special Characters. If you use it often (NOT recommended) you can program a Macro (keyboard shortcut) to insert it. There should be no space on either side of the em dash. When writing for the web, the em dash is accomplished by using the code "ampersand (&), pound or number sign (#), 8212, semi-colon." [punctuation] Listen to this article
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 8:11 AM
10 Comments:
Except in Blogger where the code does not produce the em dash on this finished blog page. It shows up fine in the RSS feed, on the preview page, but not where I really wanted it to show—and in comments! (See, I just used it to insert the dash, but it looks like an en dash to me.) Grrr!
With OpenOffice.org, the free alternative to M$ Office, when I do an em dash I do it as two en dashes -- and OO.o automatically translates it into an em dash as part of the auto-correct capabilities. Also, when I was looking into the preferred manuscript formats of various agents and publishers, many accept the double dash in lieu of the em dash. This helps the typesetter tremendously.
Blogger has been hinky lately about displaying nonstandard characters--i.e., anything you can't get to using the standard keys and, at most, the shift key. My beloved circumflex only works now in a) a pre-existing use in an entry or the template, b) a brand new, unexsited entry posted using Netscape, or c) an edited entry using Internet Explorer and pasting the symbol from another page or program. How annoying!
MS Word typically reformats a typed -- to an Em dash unless you tell it not too. However, I've noticed that some manuscript guidelines specifically call for --instead of the real thing, along with underline instead of italics and so on.
So what is an En dash for?
Karen
Argh. Darn typos! That was meant to say "unedited entry" and "not to."
Double Argh! The em dash showed in the preview of my comment, but now I see on the "real" page it is symbols again--and as you know, we cannot edit comments.
Yes, I had my MS Word set to substitute the em dash for double hyphens, which it did for about a year and now suddenly doesn't. Putting them in manually ensures they will appear...in mss.
Thanks for visiting, girls!
Oh, sorry Karen. The en dash fills an en space. Ha! Ha! I think it is the typographical element for a hyphen.
I can edit comments in WordPress. :p
An EN dash takes up the space of an N, which is usually one point. And EM dash takes up the space of an M, which is usually two points. An I is a half point.
I adore em dashes a little too much and use them in all the wrong places, but they're just so loveable!
Some people are addicted to dashes, some to ellipses. And an em dash, taking up an em space, is a relative size, depending on the font size chosen. As the resource cited says [I first typed "sited", not as bad as "sighted", huh?], the em in a 12 point font takes up 12 points, not two. I've never seen a two point font offered. It would be so tiny, it would be unreadable with the eye, naked or clothed. Hmm. I wonder if search engine spiders could read it?
Picky picky. You snot you.
What I meant was, an em space takes up the space of one space and the en dash takes up the space of half a space.
If you have 12pt font, in typesetting, an M will be one 12pt space, and N will be half a 12pt space, just like i. This is done to make the spaces between the letters look more even. If an i took up the same amount of space as an m, it would look like it was out in the middle of a word all by its lonesome.
Of course, I could be wrong. It's early enough in the year that if I am wrong now, I'll have to be right from here on out.
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