How To Use Dashes Grammar

Dashes are used to separate groups of words not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does.
How to use dashes grammar. A dash can be used to add emphasis at the beginning middle or end of a sentence. Dashes are often used to signal an abrupt change in a sentence indicating that the reader should pay close attention to what comes next. Long dashes what grammarians call em dashes are dramatic. Rules for using dashes. The em dash is the largest of the three kinds of dashes.
Generally speaking the dash does not have a unique role. There are three forms of dashes. It is usually used as an alternative to another type of punctuation. The most common types of dashes are the en dash and the em dash. It is used in the same manner as a parenthetical expression.
Dashes can be used for emphasis in several ways. When used to extend a sentence a dash can replace a semicolon a colon or three dots used as a pause for effect. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. Us english publications tend to use the longer em dash. Which you see most will depend on where what you re reading was originally published.
Use a longer em dash to join independent clauses with words like and but as or and for. At emphasis we use the shorter en dash as it s used most extensively in british english and we re based in great britain. Think of dashes as the opposite of parentheses. Both dashes do exactly the same thing. Dashes add drama parentheses whisper.
After eighty years of dreaming the elderly man realized it was time to finally revisit the land of his youth ireland. Short dashes technically en dashes aren t as showy as their wider cousins but they re still useful. 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. Spacing with punctuation periods commas semicolons colons question marks parentheses and brackets apostrophes hyphens dashes ellipses quotation marks exclamation points slashes. They insert information into a sentence and introduce lists.