Punctuation in Computerland

Factual Questions
21

I don’t use spaces before or after a dash because (a) we were taught not to in school); (b) the Chicago Manual of Style says to type two hyphens for an em dash with no space on either side; and © the dash itself is already interrupting the flow of words, so no further spacing seems necessary. However one wants to do this is OK by me, though. Whenever I come upon the spaces it just breaks up the flow of reading a tiny bit (again, probably due to training), and then on we go.

On the other side of the coin, the AP Stylebook says to put the spaces before and after the dash in all uses except the start of a paragraph and something called sports agate summaries.

22

To confuse matters even more (even taking into account different practices on either side of the Atlantic), the first site I encountered on google.co.uk when I typed in “punctuation” was a thing called grammarbook.com which appears to be Californian but which speaks here of dashes in precisely the way I would use them.

Personally, I couldn’t give a monkey’s what sort of punctuation is used as long as it helps understand what the writer means.

23

The automatic formatting feature in Microsoft Word can replace two hyphens surrounded by text with no spaces into an em dash, and two hyphens surrounded by spaces into an en dash. You can also (unless I’ve set this up myself – I think it’s a standard feature) insert an en dash with CTRL-<NumPad hyphen> and an em dash with CTRL-ALT-<NumPad hyphen>.

I have to say that I disagree with the grammarbook.com admonition against using the em dash. (I insert dashes with the CTRL-hyphen feature, and it looks like I’ll someday have to replace hundreds of en dashes with em dashes – oh well.) I wouldn’t really want to use them in business correspondence or technical writing, but they have an important place in fiction, particularly for adding a new level to varied sentence structure and for indicating abrupt changes in motion, thought or speech. I think grammarbook.com is simply advising readers to avoid a punctuation mark that can be easily misused.