The Dash July 21, 2009
Posted by egutierrez in : Punctuation , trackbackThe dash (–) is a great punctuation mark to use whenever you want to interrupt a sentence to add a set of words or phrase for emphasis. In the following sentence, the dash is used to set off a piece of text the author wants to stress:
That country — whose president promised a new era of peace — will go to war with its neighbor.
Notice the emphasis placed on whose president promised a new era of peace. Notice also the way your eyes seem to glide over the sentence faster than had the author chosen to use commas instead. Take a look at the same sentence which uses commas instead of dashes:
That country, whose president promised a new era of peace, will go to war with its neighbor.
The difference is subtle, but you should be able to notice a change not only in the pace the sentence is read, but in the way the phrase is emphasized. In the second sentence, the reader tends to make a pause upon arriving at the first comma (which is what the comma is supposed to make the reader do), then read the phrase, then pause again when he or she reaches the last comma, then read the remainder of the sentence. With the first sentence that uses dashes, though, there are no pauses before and after the phrase. In fact, with the dash the reader tends to jump right to the phrase and finish the entire sentence in one look (or one breath, if being read aloud). This effect allows the reader to process the sentence faster and grasp the importance of the emphasized phrase in a way that often surprises the reader.
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