my problem with the emdash

[nibot]

I think the mdash — which I am ilustrating right here — should be offset with spaces.

Convention is that the emdash—which is just a hyphenated parenthetical interjection—is not.

Comments

Ack!

[hukuma.livejournal.com]

An endash should never used for a topic change. It has very limited punctuational use, only to denote ranges, such as 5–10.

I'm pretty sure Tobin's sentence is correct with both commas and emdashes; it's mainly a matter of style. The emdash puts more emphasis on the interjection than commas. It certainly isn't limited to "abrupt topic changes." For example, in "I bought something today — a house!" there is no topic change at all.

"--" is a poor man's ASCII mdash, used back in the day before this newfangled Unicode thing...

Re: Ack!

[fanlain.livejournal.com]

I guess in ASCII it'd be ok if there's no acceptable alternative.

However, if it's being used in print it should be used properly or not at all. Then again, it's not like there are good designers everywhere either.

Ok so they list 5 reasons for the emdash:

1. abrupt change—something unexpected follows after this punctuation character
2. abrupt termination, to indicate that the flow of speech ends unnaturally
3. parenthetic remark—like this—which might be seen as a special case of an abrupt change followed by a return (in a sense, an abrupt change too) to the main flow of thought
4. in quotations, an em dash can be used before the name of an author or other citation; this too can be seen as an abrupt change, from quoted text to attributions
5. in enumerations, as alternative to a list bullet

I tend to use an emdash for abrupt changes. An appositive for something that still flows in terms of readability with the rest of the sentence but is also separate. And parenthesis as something that's meant as an aside or a double reference point like:

Jen's father (David Li) brought apples to the picnic

Aesthetically, I think it does look better with the spaces. I'm not willing to sacrifice the readability intention over aesthetics even though I have a design background. I guess it's to each his/her own.

Re: Ack!

[fanlain.livejournal.com]

And the endash can be used (http://www.typography-1st.com/typo/typset.htm) like an emdash in type though I agree it's not the most common usage:

"For strictly aesthetic considerations, it can also be used as a substitute for a hyphen in type set all-caps if the hyphen looks too small. Similarly, some typographers recommend using the en dash and thin spaces when using condensed or small x-height fonts instead of the em dash."

And, technically, we were also taught that the "AM" and "PM" should be a point size smaller than the time before it and sent in small caps which does look aesthetically much better though you won't see it being done by designers all that much (I do because I like it and think the way it reads that the numeric time should be given slightly more weight than the AM or PM designation).

I was a design major and English minor. It's interesting how the aesthetics v. legibility v. readability differs between the disciplines.