The Dash: An Exceedingly Versatile Punctuation Mark

“The dash is almost excessively versatile,” says Edward Johnson to writers in his Handbook of Good English. “It can interrupt the grammar of a sentence in the same way a colon can, and in a few other ways as well. A pair of dashes can enclose a parenthetical construction, as a pair of commas or parentheses can. It can separate independent clauses, as a semicolon can. And it can do some things that no other mark of punctuation can. Any castaway who is allowed only one mark of punctuation on his desert island could do worse than choose the dash (and it might even be useful for spearing fish).”

With this versatility in mind, let’s look closer at the different uses of the remarkably resourceful dash.

One: The dash is used to add information to or emphasize information at the end of a sentence, but it is really functioning as a colon — a colon with emphasis.

Remember that one function of the colon is to prepare readers for information that was hinted at or “promised” by the phrase, clause, or element that preceded it:

• Before I left the house I grabbed three Beatles albums: Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Abbey Road.

The dash can also function as a colon in constructions like the one above; note, however, how it adds emphasis to the added information or examples:

• Before I left the house I grabbed three Beatles albums — Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Abbey Road.

• All of this growth has brought with it the cyclist’s worst nightmare — a nonstop flow of automobiles.

Two: Dashes are used to set off or emphasize information within a sentence. They are essentially functioning as parentheses (creating parenthetical phrases), but as parentheses with emphasis — parentheses with power.

• Furthermore, the investigators found that the footprints — the only footprints in the house — belonged to Davis.

Here, the “only footprints in the house” phrase could have been set between commas or placed within parentheses; but by framing the phrase with dashes, it becomes powerful and important — perhaps the most important part of the statement.

Three: Dashes help clarify parenthetical phrases that contain commas (also known as appositives — nouns or noun phrases that rename nearby nouns). This example is a bit confusing:

• All the nations of Central Europe, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, have known what it is like to be in the middle of an East-West tug-of-war.

While this example is immediately clear:

• All the nations of Central Europe — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia — have known what it is like to be in the middle of an East-West tug-of-war. [1]

Four: Dashes are sometimes used to show hesitation or breaks in speech when recording or creating dialog:

• “I think you’re getting into an area that — that — we may not want to talk about.”

• “I don’t know if anyone remembers the sprint between Greg LeMond and Yuri Barinov. They took off and — It was an incredible finish at the top of the Wall!”

Other Things to Remember:

First: Do not confuse dashes and hyphens: Remember that dashes are long while hyphens are short. Dashes are used between phrases and sentences while hyphens are used between words. And dashes can function as colons and parentheses while hyphens cannot.

Second: Do not put spaces before or after dashes. The only exception (as seen above) is when a dash indicates the abrupt end of a sentence rather than the resumption of an interrupted statement; let the dash terminate the sentence and then add two spaces (as you would after a period), then capitalize the following sentence.

Third: If you use dashes too frequently, they can become distractions that obscure meaning and make your writing difficult to read. A general rule is to avoid using more than two dashes in any given sentence.

How to make a dash in Word:

In the days of the typewriter, two hyphens (--) were equivalent to a dash. (And they still are.) But today’s word-processing applications can make a true dash — also called an em dash. To make a true dash, type two hyphens without spaces around them. Type the word that follows the hyphens, then — after hitting the space bar — Word will turn the hyphens into a dash (like you see in the text above).

An English professor once told me, “In order to become a powerful, self-sufficient writer, you must master the use of the dash and semicolon.” And he was right. Knowing how to correctly use punctuation is what allows writers to say what they want to say, to form the complex sentences that express the meaning behind their complex thoughts. When you know how to correctly use the exceedingly versatile dash (and the semicolon), you can say anything in writing and be clearly understood.

Mastering the dash may not actually help you if stranded on a desert island, but such mastery can go a long way toward transforming writing into a tool at your command rather than allowing it to remain a task that can sometimes frustrate and intimidate.

[1] Joseph M. Williams’ Style, 179.