Dash it all!

I come before you today in defense of the humble dash.

Glory in its ability to spice up a humdrum sentence.

I arrived at the scene of the battle – eager to do my part – only to find an empty, windswept field.

Exult in the elegance with which it guides you through a complex sentence.

In times like these, times that try men’s souls – days of political turmoil, periods of religious zealotry and stretches of social unrest –we must not lose hope that better days are before us.

 Celebrate its effectiveness in ending a strongly worded statement with panache and power.

Tell me again how the rich and power have enriched our lives and enhanced our public discourse with their financial contributions to political campaigns, tell me – if you can.

The lovable, winsome dash

Inexplicably over the years, I’ve encountered my share of dash-haters. A fair number were English teachers besotted by the comma or enthralled by the colon, with no space left in their shrunken hearts for the lovable, winsome dash.

More than a few were stone-hearted newspaper editors whose rigid view of proper punctuation assigned the unassuming, up-for-any-challenge dash to the outer darkness.

Grouchy old Theodore M. Bernstein, a former senior editor of the New York Times, dismisses the dash in The Careful Writer as “a much-used, often over-used piece of punctuation.”

Why such animosity against the useful, visually pleasing and most accommodating dash? I tell you truly – it beats me.

I embrace this appreciation of the dash by Edward D. Johnson in The Handbook of Good English:

“The dash is almost excessively versatile. It can interrupt the grammar of a sentence in the same way a colon can, and in a few other ways as well. A pair of dashes can enclose a parenthetical construction, as a pair of commas or parentheses can. The dash can separate independent clauses, as a semicolon can. And it can do some things no other mark of punctuation can.

“Any castaway on a desert island who is allowed only one mark of punctuation could do worse than choose the dash, which might even be useful for spearing fish.”

Liberal usage

In my writing career, I’ve put the dash to good use, sprinkling it liberally through my copy and employing its organizational powers to guide my readers through the information I wish to impart and utilizing it to put special emphasis on a key parenthetical phrase.

I have blithely ignored the ill-considered instructions I received from one editor, who suggested (or, more accurately, ordered) that I should limit myself to a single set of dashes per story.

“Only lazy writers use a lot of dashes,” he said. “Use one set of dashes if you must, but depend on commas for the rest.”

Bryan A. Garner in his excellent Garner’s Modern American Usage, dismisses such rigidity in thought.

“Sometimes, perhaps as a result of an ill-founded prejudice against dashes,” he says, “writers try to make commas function in their place. Often this doesn’t work.”

Instead, “whatever the type of writing, dashes can often clarify a sentence that is clogged up with commas – or even one that’s otherwise lusterless.”

Garner offers two examples to illustrate his point, asking us to consider them if commas replaced the dashes.

It is noteworthy that the most successful revolutions – that of England in 1688 and that of America in 1776 – were carried out by men who were deeply imbued with a respect for law. Bertrand Russell.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art – like physical beauty in a person – is extremely perishable. Susan Sontag

But as we all know, too much of a good thing is, well, too much. So it goes with dashes. My personal rule – with which, happily, both Johnson and Garner agree – is to avoid using more than two dashes in a sentence. And no more than one sentence with dashes per paragraph.

There can be exceptions, of course, but it’s a good rule of thumb to follow in most cases. After all, the very effectiveness of the dash makes it necessary to employ it judiciously and not willy-nilly.

“Useful as the dash is, it is basically an interrupting mark of punctuation and is always something of a hitch for readers, bringing them up short, jabbing them in the ribs,” Johnson says. “A paragraph should have an overall smoothness; it shouldn’t repeatedly interrupt itself.”

It’s a mistake, however, to consider the comma and the dash as interchangeable devices.

While the comma signals that the reader should take his foot off the accelerator, a dash is a notice to lightly tap the brakes.

Dashes are more powerful than commas and indicate that the writer has assigned particular importance to the information enclosed within them. Dashes also permit the writer a bit more leeway in the length of the phrase within them. Anything more than four or five words need sturdy dashes rather than flimsy commas.

When useful

I find dashes particularly useful in these cases:

n  To set off an important piece of parenthetical material.

The Kenyan runner – for the first time in human history – ran a marathon in less than two hours.

n  To set off a lengthy parenthetical phrase that, for whatever reason, I don’t want to put in a separate sentence.

The tiny raft – which rocked gently to and fro, to and fro, in the steady rhythm and flow of the debris-strewn ocean – served as a not-so-uncomfortable haven for the shipwreck survivors.

n  To indicate a disruption – in thought or deed.

I stopped at the intersection and flinched when I heard the staccato burst – pop! pop! pop! – of firecrackers. “Who in the world is – wait! – those are gunshots,” I thought.

n  To end a sentence or an entire passage on a powerful and memorable note.

When we tracked the sound of the mysterious moaning noise upstairs to wind blowing through a broken window pane, the haunting of Moore Mansion was over – or so we thought.

n  To use in place of actual parentheses. Parentheses are (in my humble opinion) reader repellent. I don’t use them except under duress and then only after much soul-searching. Luckily, dashes almost always are suitable substitutes and don’t chase readers away with the efficiency that parentheses do.

Em- and en-

Finally, a word about the distinction between an em-dash and an en-dash.

In pre-word processing days, this would never have been necessary. There were no such distinctions. When typewriters ruled – in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth – there were dashes, created by double hyphens (--) and hyphens.

Today, word processing systems like Word allow us to produce an em-dash – (there’s one) so named because it’s supposedly the width of a capital M – and some allow us to produce an en-dash, which is somewhat narrower than an em-dash but wider than a hyphen. Are you with me, so far?

Em-dashes are what I – in my hidebound simplicity – refer to as dashes. An en-dash “join pairs or groups of words to show a range, and also indicate movement or tension (rather than cooperation or unity),” Garner says. “It is often equivalent to to or versus.”

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In the examples below, you'll notice I use a hyphen instead of an en-dash. That's because I don’t know how to produce an en-dash, and I don’t intend to learn. Instead, I’m going to hew to ancient rituals and use a hyphen when an en-dash would otherwise be indicated.

So if you're of a mind to use them, here are some cases in which they would be appropriate:

The Texas-OU football game

A Korea-era veteran

The Tracy-Hepburn comedy

However, multi-word adjectives such as the much-loved film or the thrice-married actor still take a hyphen. As do double last names: Dame Simpson-Bradley attended the gala.

Me, I’m sticking to dashes and hyphens. You can teach an old dog new tricks. But sometimes, he just don’t wanna learn.