The Many Dashes of Writing

Writing can get frustrating and confusing, especially for editors. One of the things that a lot of writers consider a pain in the neck is probably the use of punctuations. There are a lot of punctuations which have various functions. But among them, dashes in particular seem to have different variations.

So you’ve got the hyphen. That’s the “-” guy. It joins words together... Then there is what is called the “figure dash.” That, too, is the “-” guy. It has the same meaning and use as the hyphen, but when you use it to connect numbers, rather than words or parts of words, you call it a “figure dash.”
Then, if you are a regular reader of this website, you likely know the “em dash,” which several of us, most especially me, overuse badly. That’s the “—” guy. The long one. It has many uses, but mostly you will see it on either side of an interpolation—not an aside (which would be better marked with parentheses)—in the middle of a sentence.

And then there's one more, smack dab in the middle of a hyphen and an em dash. It's called the en dash. Technically, if you want to write something well, it's good to know these things. But for practicality, I think it's best to just keep things simple.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)


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