"The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash: Modern prose doesn't need anymore —seriously."

Over at Slate.com, Noreen Malone calls the by-writers-beloved and famously overused m-dash into question, attempting to hammer down some sharper parameters of usage:

Emily Dickinson

According to the Associated Press Stylebook—Slate's bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related—there are two main prose uses—the abrupt change and the series within a phrase—for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon—and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot—or so I have observed lately. America's finest prose—in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels—is littered with so many dashes among the dots it's as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.


What's the matter with an em dash or two, you ask?—or so I like to imagine. What's not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options—sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment—in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn't a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?


Nope—or that's my take, anyway. Now, I'm the first to admit—before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments—that I'm no saint when it comes to the em dash. I never met a sentence I didn't want to make just a bit longer—and so the dash is my embarrassing best friend. When the New York Times' associate managing editor for standards—Philip B. Corbett, for the record—wrote a blog post scolding Times writers for overusing the dash (as many as five dashes snuck their way into a single 3.5-paragraph story on A1, to his horror), an old friend from my college newspaper emailed it to me. "Reminded me of our battles over long dashes," he wrote—and, to tell the truth, I wasn't on the anti-dash side back then. But as I've read and written more in the ensuing years, my reliance on the dash has come to feel like a pack-a-day cigarette habit—I know it makes me look and sound and feel terrible—and so I'm trying to quit.


The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don't you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won't be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that's not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: "Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate." Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment—and with such shocking frequency—on these more simple forms of punctuation—the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)


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