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The 800-Word Dash to Better Punctuation
Tony: Have you ever thought about using dashes in your writing?
Frank: Wh — Wh — What did you say?
Tony: Have you ever thought about using dashes in your writing?
Frank: I don’t give a — about writing.
Tony: Well, you should. You’re smart — smart enough to use proper punctuation.
Frank: I hate —
Tony: Don’t tell me what you hate.
Are you one of those people, like Frank in the conversation above, who hates punctuation and couldn’t care less about writing? I doubt it. If you were, you wouldn’t have read this far already. Since you obviously do care about writing and punctuation, perhaps you’d like to know how to use the dash correctly in your essays and term papers.
The first thing you should know is that the dash is different from the hyphen. The hyphen is the key to the right of the number zero on most keyboards, and the hyphen is typically used in compound words such as mother-in-law or in phrases like “part-time student,” where two or three words describe another word. The dash, however, is made up of two hyphens.
Generally speaking, the dash is used in eight different situations, and four of those situations are demonstrated in the conversation above. The dash is used in…
