I can still remember the first time I saw an em dash used. To avoid confusion, you should use only one pair of em dashes in a single sentence, and not use them in adjoining sentences unless you are trying to show traits of a scatterbrained or highly distractible character. Smith was climbing the ladder - lightning! - so she quickly descended.) Grammar rules say that if you use one em dash in a sentence, you must use a second to show where the interruption ends, unless the interruption ends the sentence, in which case you use a period. Grammar books say the proper use of the em dash is to show when a thought is interrupted. Proponents say the em dash is embraced because its captures the way people talk - in a breezy, hurried fashion, unconcerned with formalities. Then I must go back and insert spacing before and after the em dash. On my keyboard, for example, to make an em dash I must end one word, double hyphenate, and start another word, all without spacing. The writer is just too lazy, or in too much of a hurry, to choose the correct punctuation, say critics.īut those who embrace the em dash point out that it takes extra work to use it since there is no em dash key on keyboards. It is under fire because it is seen as unspecific punctuation.

Here, for example, is a poem of hers showing her use of the em dash.īecause the em dash can mean almost any kind of punctuation you want it to mean, it is both under fire and embraced, depending on your stance. Today’s editors publish the poems as Dickinson wrote them. The editors removed her em dashes, and replaced them with commas, periods and question marks. Some of her original editors tried to repunctuate Dickinson’s poems to make them conform to standard English.

If you’ve read the poetry of Emily Dickinson, you’ve seen the em dash used instead of other punctuation. It is called an em because it is the length of the letter “M.” There is also an en dash ( – ), basically a hyphen. The dash, or rather the em dash ( - ), is getting lots of press lately.įirst, what is an em dash? It is a double hyphen ( - ) without the space between the two hyphens, and with a space on either side separating it from preceding or subsequent words.

Poem with dashes