In Defense of the Em Dash: A Writer’s Confession

A shameless fan of the em dash

Let’s get this out of the way early on: I’m a shameless fan of the em dash.

It’s only in the last few years that I figured out this tiny line and its first cousins, the en dash and hyphen. And I’ll admit it makes me grumpy that now — finally — I understand proper usage, and I’m afraid to use it lest my writing get branded as AI.

It’s actually pretty amazing the punch this particular form of punctuation gives a sentence. Depending on how it’s used, the em dash can do the work of a colon, a semicolon, a comma, or parentheses. It can signify a break in thought, link related ideas, or set off parenthetical information. It influences what we read, drawing attention and placing emphasis on an idea or emotion.

Take this sentence, for example: Cait snuggled happily into her chair to read — only to see her book sitting on the kitchen table. Or: Cait snuggled happily into her chair to read, only to see her book sitting on the kitchen table. Which one feels stronger and is better at telling us how  Cait felt when she realized her book was on the other side of the room?

The pause created by the comma registers that the book is out of reach, but there’s no real emotional weight to the moment. The dash, on the other hand, signifies a distinct break in the sentence — this is the moment when Cait would be muttering to herself about having to get up when she’d just gotten comfortable.

Try it yourself. Make up your own sentences and see how they differ depending on what form of punctuation you choose.

The dash is my obsession.

So yes, the dash is my obsession. When I look at a page of text, my eyes are drawn to this tiny little line. I comb through the pages of my favourite authors’ work to see if they’re still using it,I add it to my own writing, remove it, then add it again.

Somewhere along the way I even went looking online for permission to keep using the em dash. I wound up on Reddit, reading a thread on the three dashes. One poster said that at the age of 30, she’d only ever heard of the hyphen, and wondered if the other two had always been a thing. It’s not that surprising that the poster was unfamiliar with the en dash as it is rarely taught in K-12, where the hyphen is what students learn to use instead.

What did surprise me was a reply suggesting the em dash is so old it’s become obsolete, an idea that seems unrealistic when you look at the evidence:

• I remember learning about the em dash in school
• How to properly use all three dashes gets its own section in a grammar course I took a couple years back at Simon Fraser University
• Explanations also appear in multiple university style guides across Canada
• The Canadian Department of Justice offers guidance on when to use the em dash in legislative counsel
• All three dashes show up regularly in the nation’s newspapers.
• There are even specific keystrokes that have been created just to insert an em/en dash into a document.

It’s also worth noting that the comma and parentheses have been in use for at least as long as the em dash, yet nobody’s calling them obsolete. 

As for how to use it in a sentence, I’m a strong advocate of the open style, with a space on either side. This format is favoured mainly by magazines and newspapers, due to tight column widths. I’m not a fan of the squished appearance favoured by the Chicago Manual of Style, where the dash butts right up against the letters on either side. I understand the reasoning—the dash is already a strong symbol and doesn’t require all that extra room— but I like my space.

As far as all this negativity around the entire mess goes, I get it. But the issue probably isn’t going away anytime soon, and I’ll be darned if I change how I write to accomodate the problem.

The various forms of punctuation were created to improve the way we write, and while it is unfortunate that AI went em-dash happy when it saw the value in this particular mark, that’s not a reason to abandon it.

I’ll be keeping mine, thank you very much.

To learn more about writing and punctuation in Canada, visit the Language Navigator on the Government of Canada website.