How To Use Dashes Grammar
Which you see most will depend on where what you re reading was originally published.
How to use dashes grammar. The em dash is the largest of the three kinds of dashes. They insert information into a sentence and introduce lists. Dashes add drama parentheses whisper. At emphasis we use the shorter en dash as it s used most extensively in british english and we re based in great britain. A dash can be used to add emphasis at the beginning middle or end of a sentence.
It is usually used as an alternative to another type of punctuation. After eighty years of dreaming the elderly man realized it was time to finally revisit the land of his youth ireland. To set off material for emphasis. Rather than placing parentheses around a phrase within a statement writers can opt to surround the phrase with an em dash on either end. Those long straight lines draw your eye and hold your attention.
Short dashes technically en dashes aren t as showy as their wider cousins but they re still useful. It is used in the same manner as a parenthetical expression. Us english publications tend to use the longer em dash. Dashes are used to separate groups of words not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. There are three forms of dashes.
A good way to remember the difference between these two dashes is to visualize the en dash as the length of the letter n and the em dash as the length of the letter m. Both dashes do exactly the same thing. But long dashes aren t just show offs. Em en and the double hyphen. An em dash is used to indicate a break in a sentence or question.
The most common types of dashes are the en dash and the em dash. A single dash can emphasize material at the beginning or end of a sentence. Where parentheses indicate that the reader should put less emphasis on the enclosed material dashes indicate that the reader should pay more attention to the material between the dashes. Dashes like commas semicolons colons ellipses and parentheses indicate added emphasis an interruption or an abrupt change of thought. Think of dashes as the opposite of parentheses.