![]() ![]() Īnd to signify that someone got cut off in the middle of a thought or sentence, as in: “Thank you for the mangled mouse corpse!” -Me, to my cat. My cat-not the same one who delivers me dead animals-loves to drown toys in her water bowl.Īs Merriam-Webster explains, em dashes are also used for quote attribution, like so: Īn em dash can also set apart an aside that you might otherwise distinguish with commas or parentheses. My cat has a pretty revolting habit that I wish she’d break- bringing me dead animals. It can take the place of a semicolon, colon, or comma if you’re trying to introduce a new clause with slightly more emphasis or drama. When to use an em dash instead of some other punctuation mark is largely up to you. It’s longer than an en dash-just like the elements you’re separating. If the answer is the former, go with an em dash. ![]() In general, a good way to remember whether you need an em dash or an en dash is to ask yourself some version of this question: Are you trying to separate whole parts of a sentence, or link individual terms together? That said, unless they’re all lined up next to each other, it’s not always easy to identify which one you’re looking at, so it helps to have a handle on which contexts call for which little line. As its name suggests, an em dash (-) is roughly the length of the letter M, while an en dash (–) more closely matches an N. You can blame that difficulty at least partially on how similar they look. But even that can’t compare to the puzzle of picking the right kind of dash or hyphen to drop into a sentence. The semicolon-vs.-colon decision is a bit tougher to make. When it comes to proper punctuation, choosing between an exclamation point and a question mark is child’s play. ![]()
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