4 ms·

No spaces round an em-dash is what's correct in American English. (Also, Menand's piece that you cite has no spaces around em-dashes either)

• SeanLuke 11y ago
  Though things are tangled now, American English traditionally has thin spaces on the sides of m-dashes.
• dragonwriter 11y ago
  No spaces around em-dashes is what most commonly recommended in American style guides though done recommend thin spaces and some have, or at least accept, seeing them open (i.e., with normal spaces). This is a flexible issue of style, though, more than of linguistic "correctness" (and even the choice between an em-dag and an en-dash set open, for the same user, is a style issue on which different American manuals will disagree.)
  • scott_s 11y ago
    I prefer no spaces around em-dashes for the entirely subjective reason that I find it aesthetically pleasing. It boggles my mind that other people look at an elegant em-dash and think, "Yes... with spaces... now it looks right." There are some instances when I use spaces - such as in in forum posts or emails, which are far more ephemeral, and I'm not going to hunt around for the actual em-dash character, and I'll use us a space and a hyphen as an uglier, but expedient, substitute.
    • SeanLuke 11y ago
      > I prefer no spaces around em-dashes for the entirely subjective reason that I find it aesthetically pleasing. It boggles my mind that other people look at an elegant em-dash and think, "Yes... with spaces... now it looks right." I think it's because with no spaces, an em-dash looks like it's connecting two words into a single word. Name another phrase-level punctuation mark (period, comma, semicolon, colon, quote, question mark, ellipses, parentheses) which isn't connected to a space. There's a reason for that. [Hyphens, apostrophes, slashes, etc. are word-level.]
• maratc 11y ago
  There is no correct and incorrect; it is a matter of the manual of style you're adhering to. Chicago (2.13): An em dash has no space before or after, unless you're doing some fancy word-replacing maneuvers with a 2-em dash. AP (p. 368): An em dash, like an ellipsis, has a space before and after, except when used to introduce items in a vertical list. http://www.apvschicago.com/2011/05/em-dashes-and-ellipses-closed-or-spaced.html http://www.apvschicago.com/2011/05/em-dashes-and-ellipses-cl... Edit: this won't be complete without mentioning Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style: > The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.
• DanBC 11y ago
  > correct in American English Wikipedia has megabytes (hundreds of thousands of words) of discussion around when to use m dash, n dash, hyphen, or minus. Some conversations went to arbcom. Some editors probably got bans. "Correct" is a dangerous word.