How To Use Em Dashes In A Sentence
2 the weary traveler forgot something in the airport bathroom her plane ticket.
How to use em dashes in a sentence. The most common types of dashes are the en dash and the em dash. Use em dashes in place of a semicolon. There are three forms of dashes. Use an em dash to bring focus to a list. Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder with a dash of the dictionary.
The dash is less formal than the colon. When the list comes first it s better to use a dash to connect the list to the clause. Em dashes also precede quotation attributions. To properly use a dash in an english sentence start by identifying which dash you should use. For example em dashes are used when a parenthetical remark contains an internal comma or would otherwise sound awkward if enclosed by commas.
In this use em dashes are similar to commas and parentheses but there are subtle differences. The em dash in place of a colon. Em dashes are great. Em dashes can be used to emphasize important or essential information midsentence or at the end of sentences. Dashes are used to separate groups of words not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does.
When a sentence begins with an independent clause and ends with a list you can use a colon between the clause and the list. Once again the em dash adds more emphasis than the traditional punctuation mark. Take the following sentence as an example. To illustrate i m going to reproduce the first sentence of this paragraph but with a. If none of these work for you just google keyboard shortcut for em dash windows or word word 2016 windows 365 mac mac pages ios and so on.
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. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. Use a longer em dash to join independent clauses with words like and but as or and for. Jamel brinkley from no more than a bubble in a lucky man this is a straightforward but captivating look at how an em dash can be used in a sentence to create an image for the reader. Although colons and commas can serve the same function em dashes create a more dramatic effect.