Em Dash Spaces

A pair of em dashes can replace a pair of parentheses.

Em dash spaces. Glitter felt yarn and buttons his kitchen looked as if a clown had exploded. Its use or misuse for this purpose is a matter of taste and subject to the effect on the writer s or reader s ear. Em dashes are especially common in informal writing such as personal emails or blogs but it s best to use them sparingly when you are writing formally.

The associated press style always the outlier insists on spacing both before and after the em dash. Miss s killed professor p with a candlestick in the study. Dashes are considered less.

Otherwise leave them out. The em dash in place of a colon. It allows in a manner similar to parentheses an additional thought to be added within a sentence by sort of breaking away from that sentence as i ve done here.

The name comes from the fact that in tradtional typesetting the dash is the same width as a capital m. You may also be interested in. The em dash has several uses.

If you re writing for a newspaper magazine or website that uses associated press style put in the spaces. Em dash em dashes in place of commas. An em dash has no space before or after unless you re doing some fancy word replacing maneuvers with a 2 em dash.

Use one before the parenthetical information and one after it. An em dash is a punctuation mark which is used alone to indicate a pause in speech or in pairs to take the place of commas. One exception is of course when the hyphen is used as a minus sign.