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

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.