A Dash of Grammar, or Em and En (And Hyphens)

Ah, the lowly dash. And it’s many forms. We so love using them, especially Gen X and Millennial writers. We especially love our em dashes (— ). Nothing wrong with that, though I wish Cormac McCarthy had made peace with quotation marks before he died. Blood Meridian was brilliant but hard to read.

And yet, as I go through my latest editing project and look back on my previous one, I keep seeing a dash error that drives me to distraction. The previous project came from the pen of a guy who started doing this before I was born. (My first election was Reagan’s reelection bid, for perspective, when David Lee Roth sang for Van Halen on Ye Olde Victrola whilst we drove the ol’ La Salle to the Woolworth’s for a grape Nehi.*) Yet, I also received back the latest Jim Winter offering back from Dawn Barclay, my talented colleague at Down & Out Books. As I am Jim, I received a rude awakening. I do the same damn thing! What is this horrific atrocity in writing?

Everyone, and I mean everyone, including your humble narrator, hyphenates adverbs. STOP THAT! (Pauses to go yell at both TS Hottle and Jim Winter and hopes wife doesn’t call the men with the butterfly nets and strait-jacket.)

What bugs me about Dawn’s horrific revelations is the next Winter book is a collection. Which means two-thirds of these stories were edited by someone else before I cleaned them up. Eek! That’s two editorial passes that missed that error. Strangely, I never get called out on em dashes. Once, when Second Wave was beta read, I did get a note on the difference between the em dash and the en dash and a hyphen.

• Hyphens: Hyphens are used to join two words into the single idea. Most often, you see it in some last names, like Alec Walker-Jones. It also can join two adjectives, such as “music-obsessed.” Occasionally, it’s used with nouns, but not often. Technically, hyphens are not dashes. They are not to be used to join any word ending in –ly to another word. So, the phrase “criminally-wrong” is just “criminally wrong.”
• En dashes: Sometimes used to join words the way hyphens sometimes do. Calling a hyphen an en dash in a number, time, or date range (200-300, 1939-1945, 3:00-3:45) is technically correct, which is often the best kind of correct. But never best-kind, because “best” is an adverb, just like all those “-ly” words Stephen King tells you not to use, yet frequently abuses.
• Em dashes: Em dashes are the favorite punctuation mark of any writer born between 1964 and 1997. We love them! We use them in lieu of parentheses—though inside a sentence, they must be used in pairs—and to indicate someone’s speech has been interrup— Why the disdain for parentheses? Why not use ellipses(…)? Ellipses indicate trailing off. As for parentheses, believe me, when I first started writing, I was a serial parentheses abuser. Someone pointed out I wrote too many asides in my essays—which, by the way, can get annoying. (See what I did there?) As Microsoft Word improved, along with its alternatives and tools like Scrivener, grammar tools helpfully autocorrected the double hyphen (“–”) into an em dash. Em dashes may or may not be technically correct—still the best kind of correct, but not best-kind of correct, but they really do enhance readability. My tenth-grade English teacher may disagree, but my tenth-grade English teacher thought Led Zeppelin would give me a heart attack and Heinlein would rot my mind. (Jury’s out on the latter.)

So there you have it. Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

*Do they still make Nehi?