As someone who takes flak from literati friends for his em dashin', this is a vindicating find—(!)thanks, OP. I learned to use em dashes in the military on our

As someone who takes flak from literati friends for his em dashin', this is a vindicating find—(!)thanks, OP. I learned to use em dashes in the military on our performance reports (sort of like an annual resume with a grade attached). For a few (dubious) reasons, every bullet had to be precisely 1 line long, +/- 0-3 spaces at EOL (we had almost as many rules regarding these bullets as we did the other kind, it seemed). Since we had a lot of (usually somewhat independent) points to jam into 1 line, we often had lots of separate clauses with a period, semi-colon[1], or em dash. The em dash always seemed to fill precisely the correct amount of space. 1: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon