How To Use Dashes Examples

Examples include mother in law or pick me up.

How to use dashes examples. Along with its use in place of brackets and colons a dash can be used when writing dialogue for example to show that someone speaking has been interrupted. Examples include conflicting sides of an argument democrat republican debate connecting a prefix or suffix to an unhyphenated compound post civil war new york based and directional references los angeles san diego bus east west highway. You can sometimes use a dash to help readers see that certain words are meant as an introduction or conclusion to your sentence. Em dashes save the day when other punctuation would be awkward. Dashes can also be used to show repetition of a word or phrase for effect and to separate repetitive phrases.

Use dashes to set off appositives that contain commas. Rather than placing parentheses around a phrase within a statement writers can opt to surround the phrase with an em dash on either end. Books paper pencils many students lacked even the simplest tools for learning in nineteenth century america. For instance em dashes can replace parentheses at the end of a sentence or when multiple commas appear in a parenthetical phrase. Dashes can be used to add parenthetical statements or comments in much the same way as you would use brackets.

For more on using commas for appositives see commas eg. In other words if you are renaming a nearby noun with something that contains commas use dashes to set if off. Dashes can be used to create emphasis in a sentence. It is used in the same manner as a parenthetical expression. Hyphens are not the same as dashes.

An em dash is used to indicate a break in a sentence or question. En dashes are also used to represent a conflict connection or direction between two words or compounds. They are used to make a connection between two words working as a unit or when two words have a combined meaning. A colon e g it depends on one thing trust a semicolon e g it depends on trust it always has three dots used as a pause for effect e g it needed trust. Joe a student who is also an athlete actor and writing coach does not have enough time to join the committee.

The name em indicates that the dash is roughly the size of the letter m. These are known as compound words. In formal writing you should use the bracket rather than the dash as a dash is considered less formal. After a split second of hesitation the second baseman leaped for the ball or rather limped for it. A common example of this is the term award winning in the phrase the award winning scientist the en dash is used to modify the two words to make them into a single descriptor.