When And How To Use Dashes
It is named as it occupies the space like the letter n.
When and how to use dashes. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. You are the friend the only friend who offered to help me. When used to extend a sentence a dash can replace a semicolon a colon or three dots used as a pause for effect. When a range with en dash falls at the. A single dash can emphasize material at the beginning or end of a sentence.
Dashes can be used for emphasis in several ways. In order to use this dash sign you have to press control and key in the numeric keypad. Em en and the double hyphen. The em dash is the largest of the three kinds of dashes. After eighty years of dreaming the elderly man realized it was time to finally revisit the land of his youth ireland.
Alternatively you can use alt with numeric keys 0150. Here are some examples. An en dash is most commonly used to indicate a range of numbers like pages 182 197 in a book or an event happening from 1 p m 5 p m. Dashes like commas semicolons colons ellipses and parentheses indicate added emphasis an interruption or an abrupt change of thought. Dashes are used to separate groups of words not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does.
When used as parentheses dashes are alternatives to brackets or commas. It is used in the same manner as a parenthetical expression. When used with numbers en dashes can generally be read as to or through for example if you read the statement pages 182 197 out loud it would sound like pages 182 through 197. En dashes are also used to represent a conflict connection or direction between two words or compounds. 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.
Experienced writers know that these marks are not interchangeable. Dashes are often used to signal an abrupt change in a sentence indicating that the reader should pay close attention to what comes next. Rather than placing parentheses around a phrase within a statement writers can opt to surround the phrase with an em dash on either end. This is a symbol for typing dash. Note how dashes subtly change the tone of the following sentences.