How To Use Dashes In Legal Writing

Simplify your life by assigning a shortcut key to the em dash and any other symbols that you use frequently.

How to use dashes in legal writing. Dashes are used to separate groups of words not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. At some point between 1680 and 2016 i pinpoint it in 1996 nefarious forces took over in legal writing. You could use commas here instead but dashes change the emphasis b. His neighbor with whom he had had several serious disagreements removed a section of the fence. Both sentences should be complete and their content should be very closely related.

A dash is a little horizontal line that floats in the middle of a line of text not at the bottom. The en dash is shorter than an em dash and longer than a hyphen. Em dashes may also be used to tack on an important afterthought at the end of a sentence. Use parentheses to set off matter that you want to minimize or that is helpful but not essential. Our clients singh lafrance and ivanoff have sent us the documents we requested.

Here are the basics. It s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. You can use a colon to connect two sentences when the second sentence summarizes sharpens or explains the first. Dashes can also be used to set off a clause parenthetical expression or list. Use it when a comma is too weak but a colon semi colon or pair of paren the ses is too strong.

Today brackets and parentheses are misused often enough to make any sensible reader. Note that if you use colons this way too often it can break up the flow of your writing. To make an em dash in microsoft word use the shortcut alt0151 or click insert click symbols on the far right select more symbols special characters and em dash. The em dash is used to make a break be tween parts of a sen tence. It never takes a space before or after the mark.