Punctuation peeves

Not pets of any kind, just common problems you can fix before I see them, thanks

I love helping people express themselves effectively. I honestly don’t mind correcting punctuation, refining grammar and syntax, balancing sentence and paragraph pacing, sharpening logic, strengthening story structure… you know, all the fun stuff.

But my time costs you money. There’s no sense paying me to correct things you could easily clean up yourself. This is especially important if you’re sending your words into the world without letting someone else look at them first, to make sure you aren’t going to be misunderstood (and won’t embarrass yourself; that happens sometimes).

So I’ll start sharing with you the comments I’m leaving in the margins of my clients’ work, and others to whom I give feedback (I serve as a judge for certain writing contests, one of which may or may not be underway right now, and in which I remain anonymous). This won’t take the place of the longer articles. I do hope you find them helpful, and perhaps entertaining too.

This came up today:

Not sure if this is the best place for an em-dash, a comma or a colon could have served better, perhaps. 

But if you want an em-dash you need to actually use a proper em-dash, the really long kind (shift-option-hyphen), which I’ve included for you in the text for comparison.

What you have there is an en-dash, which denotes a range of numeric values or dates… wrong punctuation. 

Enclosed in brackets so you can see the difference between them:
the hyphen [-], the en-dash [–], and the em-dash [—].

Also, you’ve added a space on either side of the dash, which many publishers require… but CMOS, the standard for trade publications, says “no spaces around an em-dash.” 

“Fiddlesticks to both of them,” sez I. 

Many editors of poetry and short fiction (myself included) suggest adding just one space to set off the dash from one side of the text or the other.

If you put the space before the dash (so it “attaches” to the following text), it denotes an interruption. If you put the space after the dash (so it attaches to the preceding text), it denotes a brief pause that emphasizes what follows it.

Try out the effect for yourself— it works.

Or if you are chatting away and someone —what’s that? Oh, an interruption!

There you go. Now you know how to use that long em-dash to achieve two distinct purposes while snubbing your nose at big publishers’ needlessly narrow rules at the same time. Plus, now you know what that oft-neglected en-dash is for (denoting a range of values, like 2020–2024. Yes, I know, all your life you’ve been using a common hyphen for that. It’s one of the most common mistakes I find in academic papers and dissertations).

Later we can explore the happy world of hyphens. For now, enjoy your dashes!