Em dash vs en dash grammar girl books

Note how dashes subtly change the tone of the following sentences. Because selfpublishers are responsible for everything that ends up in their books, you need to know what each of these characters means, the differences between hyphens, en dashes and em dashes, and how to get them into your book in the right way. Mignon fogarty is the founder of quick and dirty tips and the author of seven books on language, including the new york times bestseller grammar girls quick and dirty tips for better writing. In this use, em dashes are similar to commas and parentheses, but there are subtle differences. If youre writing for a newspaper, magazine, or website that uses associated. The em dash is the length of a lower case letter m and the en dash is the length of the letter n. Dashes versus colons grammar girl quick and dirty tips. I recommend this to anyone who writes fiction or nonfiction books or articles. She is an inductee in the podcasting hall of fame, and the show is a fivetime winner of best education podcast in the podcast awards. Hyphens, en dashes, em dashes the chicago manual of. The en dash is slightly longer than the hyphen but not as long as the em dash. You are the friend, the only friend, who offered to help me. Writers love em dashes as much as hunters love swiss army knives.

Dashes, like commas, semicolons, colons, ellipses, and parentheses, indicate added emphasis, an interruption, or an abrupt change of thought. There are two kinds of dashes, the en dash, and the em dash long dash. Find out whether you need spaces on either side of an emdash. Em dashes are often used to set off parenthetical information. You might call it the bad boy, or cool girl, of punctuation. I recommend you stick to spaced en dashes or closedup em dashes in fiction. Experienced writers know that these marks are not interchangeable. What is the difference in usage between an em dash and an en dash. An en dash is a punctuation mark that is slightly wider than a hyphen but narrower than an em dash. Whether you are using the longer em dash in a sentence or the shorter. When using the em dash and the en dash you should not leave any spaces between the punctuation and the next word. Dashes that set off text and replace alternative punctuation. To show how to wield this handy punctuation mark, ill start by comparing two sentences. Using em dashes instead of parentheses puts the focus on the information between the em dashes.

We use em dashes to add emphasis to the size of the car. The en dash is a symbol that is slightly wider than a hyphen. First of all, there are three lengths of what are all more or less dashes. Dont replace the second emdash as some tend to with a comma or semicolon. Use em dashes to set off parenthetical information. Em dashes set apart parenthetical phrases or clauses in a sentence. An em dash is longer than an en dash and three times as long as a hyphen. It is useful and versatile, and too few writers make use of it. Its also important that when you set off a phrase using em dashes that you used one emdash immediately after the noun the phrase is describing and one immediately after the phrase. A common myth holds that the en dash is, in fact, the width of a typesetters letter n, whereas the em dash is the width of the letter mthus their names.