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Cutting A Dash - Using Correct Dash Technique
Attention to detail can give you an edge. Picture this: You are putting all your efforts into writing an essay on that late, great actor Marlon Brando. The first thing you need is an eye-catching headline; something that tells the reader immediately exactly what the subject of the essay will be. After much deliberation you opt for:
The Life of Marlon Brando (1924-2004)
Perfect; you are off to a flying start. Or are you?
If you want your essay to be as professional-looking as possible ---and this is something you should strive to achieve at all times--- then you need to have a closer look at that headline and weed out the tiny glitch. Can you see it? The spelling and capitalisation are correct, and the years of his birth and death are accurate, so what could it be?
The answer lies between the two years in the brackets. These have been separated using a hyphen (-), but in order to be grammatically correct and to show your readers that you know your onions, the slightly longer en dash (--) should be used. If this comes as news to you, then when I tell you that there is an even longer dash, the em dash (---), which, you may have noticed, I have used in the text above, then you may be scratching your head thinking this is all balderdash.
So what exactly are em and en dashes, and where do they hide on the Microsoft Word Keyboard?
The em is an old printers' measurement that was originally the width of the letter M, and it is from here that the em dash gets its name. The en dash, and I think you may be ahead of me now, is approximately as long as the letter N is wide. They are the most commonly used of dashes, and the only ones we will be dealing with here (other dashes include the figure dash, the horizontal bar and the swung dash, but they are not nearly so common). So now that we know what they are, let's look at some of the ways they are used.
As shown in the example above, the en dash is used to link the extremes of a range. It can be seen in everyday use in such forms as age 3--5 years, sizes 6--11, working 9--5 etc. You can create an en dash in Microsoft Word by holding down the Alt key and typing 0150 (be sure the Num Lock is on). A quicker and more impressive way, however, is to print it straight onto the page by typing the first part of your range, say 1924, then immediately after that, space, hyphen, space, followed by the second figure, in this case 2004. When you hit the space bar after this second figure, the en dash should appear automatically.
The em dash is used primarily to separate a parenthetical thought ---as I am doing here--- or a similar break from the flowing text. It is also used in dialogue to indicate that a speaker has stopped talking because of such causes as interruption, emotional breakdown or sudden death; for example
"The killer lurks among us right now, and the name of that killer is---"
We'll never know.
To create an em dash, hold down the Alt key and type 0151. Alternatively, type it straight onto the page by inserting two hyphens immediately after the last word before the parenthetical break, then type the first word of the break without leaving a space. When you hit the space bar after this word the two hyphens will magically merge into an em dash.
Why don't you experiment with your keyboard and memorise these useful characters. To use them demonstrates that you pay attention to detail; a factor that may be of importance in such written submissions as essays and job applications.
There are many more invisible characters hiding within the keyboard, so why not embark on a Microsoft training programme to discover what and where they are.
And when you have finished your essay, complete with em and en dashes, be sure to mark it as copyright yourself.
That's Alt and 0169.
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