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 ...

But my point remains true: A hyphen is not an em dash. Nor is it an en dash. Each of these three punctuation marks has its own special job. Em dashes, often simply called dashes, are sentence ...

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 ...

My wife, Cindy, a retired English teacher, alerted us to that hyphen, a piece of punctuation that was hiding in plain sight. Most of us didn’t know it was there, even though we claim to have ...

Find out more punctuation mistakes even smart people make. A hyphen is what appears when you just press the button next to the zero key. In short, a hyphen links words together. It’s what you ...

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 ...