News

When to use an em dash instead of some other punctuation mark is largely up to you. It can take the place of a semicolon, colon, or comma if you’re trying to introduce a new clause with slightly ...
I was thinking about the difference between a hyphen and a dash, and reached out to our friendly AI for an answer. Artificial ...
Suspicious that an awkward email or stilted college essay may have been written by artificial intelligence? Some people think there’s a surefire way to tell — the em dash. Writers, journalists ...
"Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair," said The Spectator, for the semicolon, that "most elegant, elusive of ...
Opinion
In defense of the em dash
“The em dash can also usurp the semicolon’s glory — for it shows more than equality! The em dash has its own veritable inflection — its own tempo! One can use it profusely to show excitement and ...
The em dash is punctuation loved by writers everywhere, functioning like a comma, colon or parenthesis. It can be used to sum up information at the end of a sentence, encase supplementary ...
Mary Norris, the New Yorker’s “Comma Queen” and the author of “Between You and Me,” wrote in an email that the em dash “can be substituted for almost any other mark of punctuation ...
punctuation will vary based on the writing style requested. On the one hand, the received opinion that the long dash is a product of generative AI that basically didn’t exist in years past is a ...
The em dash (—) is a supremely useful (and fashionable) piece of punctuation used in writing and editing, often in place of a comma, colon, or parenthesis. While you might want to utilize it to ...
Yes, a full stop here—but shouldn't there be a comma there? Or would a hyphen be better? Punctuation can be a nuisance; it is often simply neglected. Wrong! The most recent statistical analyses ...
The semicolon may be endangered but there is one form of punctuation that seems to be flourishing: the em dash. And that's probably down to artificial intelligence. Sometimes called the long hyphe ...