Dashes are small punctuation marks that appear in writing and indicate pauses, breaks, parenthetical thoughts, and more. There are actually several kinds of dashes in the English language, so today we’ll cover them.
This is likely the most common dash seen in fiction writing. It’s called an em dash because it’s about the same width as a printed capital letter M. It looks like this:
—
The em dash is excellent at setting off parenthetical thoughts. Use one before and one after the additional information:
As you can see, the em dashes in these sentences perform a similar function to parentheses. They add greater context to a detail mentioned in the sentence, though they aren’t integral parts of the sentence by themselves. Therefore, they’re set apart with em dashes.
Em dashes can be used alone to indicate a moment of surprise in writing:
And they can also be used in dialogue to signify an interruption:
“Okay, okay. You had a rough day. I get it!”
Like any tool, it’s best not to overuse em dashes in our writing. If we do, our prose can become clunky and unsurprising. The old aphorism rings true here: less is more.
Not to be confused with the em dash, the en dash is a smaller dash so named because it’s about the length of a printed capital letter N. It looks like this:
–
Unlike the em dash, the en dash usually indicates time spans or connects compound thoughts:
En dashes can also be used for parenthetical thoughts:
Whether to use em dashes or en dashes here is up to personal taste or style guidelines. However, if you do opt for en dashes surrounding parenthetical thoughts, you must always have a space before and after each dash.
This is the rarest of dashes used in English. It looks like this:
⁓
If you’ve never seen a swung dash before, no worries. They stand for words that have been previously referenced and are therefore clear from context. Swung dashes appear almost exclusively in dictionaries.
For example, let’s pretend we’re creating a usage example for the word “generally.” Here’s the New Oxford American Dictionary definition:
For our example, we’ll use the swung dash to stand in for the word “generally,” since it’s already been established as the word being defined.
Unless you’re writing dictionaries, you might never use this dash. Still, it can’t hurt to be aware of it!
Wondering when to use dashes vs hyphens? Check out our article on the topic.
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