Fossil Poetry

[peteryoung]

The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash. I rarely use em dashes because I find them unappealingly long, and prefer a spaced en dash. As to the shape of the resulting sentence – which is the whole point of the article – I'm partially guilty, m'lud. I usually find the flow of a sentence can be improved upon by moving a dash-enclosed phrase to the beginning, instead of leaving it plateaued – like an awkwardly placed mountain you can't overlook – somewhere in the middle.

Via supergee.

Comments

[coth.livejournal.com]

I find en dashes, and en or em dashes used without a space each side, to be unappealingly cramped. So I do use em dashes when I can be bothered to go the extra mile for the appearance. And I put a space either side of a dash as well. It's all how you feel about it, and I'm not that bothered. I write in many different places (MS Word, Notepad, LJ) with different formatting possibilities and tools, so mostly my dashes are en dashes because it's not worth working out the special formatting command in yet another different place.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Any device that makes writing clearer can salvage careless writing, and could therefore be accused of encouraging carelessness. It's like grumbling about full stops.

By the way, have you been following Shady Characters?

http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/feed/

So far, he's done the pilcrow, the interrobang, and the octothorpe.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

In many fonts, yes, the em dash is sufficiently long as to be pretty much unusable ... in which cases, en dash to the rescue.