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The em dash is the most beautiful punctuation mark, all the more because it is rare --- and it is best kept that way. Certainly a sentence with more than two is
by combatentropy 9y ago
The em dash is the most beautiful punctuation mark, all the more because it is rare --- and it is best kept that way. Certainly a sentence with more than two is imparsible. In fact, more than a few in a whole article is probably getting annoying. It's like the exclamation point in that way.
Once you discover the em dash, it is hard to restrain yourself. But I'm trying to come back to the comma. It does its work without fanfare, almost invisibly. The mature writer realizes his job is to tell the reader something without getting in the way.
I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash. Unconventionally, I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens. The traditional two aren't long enough. But two is better than one. I always have to reread sentences by someone who thinks the hyphen and the dash are the same thing.
- cryptonector 9y agoTwo hyphens is plenty. Three is calling attention to it. One is pitiful. While we're on this subject, wide spacing between sentence-ending periods and the next sentence is the Right Way (tm). In ASCII that's two spaces. We're not animals. Let's behave accordingly.
- seandougall 9y ago> While we're on this subject, wide spacing between sentence-ending periods and the next sentence is the Right Way (tm). This convention started with typewriters, and typesetters (e.g. my parents) will tell you that it is only considered correct in monospace fonts. This is also why HTML takes the liberty of reducing whitespace down to a single space character unless you go out of your way to use an .
- gnicholas 9y agoBut what of sentences that end with an abbreviation that ends in a period, like "U.S."? If it's just one space after a period, it's impossible to know that the sentence has ended? I realize in books or published articles this can be typeset in a smart way to make it distinguishable, but what about in ordinary writing?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cryptonector 9y agoExactly. "I live in the U.S. I am happy." requires a bit more cognitive work to parse if spaces after sentence-ending periods are not wider. EDIT: For completeness, here is that same text with an extra space: "I live in the U.S. I am happy." -- see how much easier that is to read? Sure, it's not that big a deal, but it's definitely kind to the reader.
- function_seven 9y agoRegarding your edit, it appears exactly the same :(. The browser collapses whitespace. I'm not sure if HN's comment system will allow you to double-space after a period, other than in a <pre> block: I live in the U.S. I am happy. I live in the U.S. I am happy.
- cryptonector 9y agoAy, thanks.
- angelsl 9y agoYour double space was collapsed by the browser.
- Symbiote 9y agoBritish: I don't live in the US. I am happy. Full stops aren't generally used in abbreviations here, Mx Cryptonector. Though there's a more recent trend to write "Nato" rather than NATO, which annoys me for the inconsistency that arises. Plenty of people pronounce VAT as one word, or PAYE, but these are usually left in capitals.
- dmurray 9y agoNato (but VAT) has been preferred by the Guardian style guide [0] for a long time. I've never understood it. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a
- cryptonector 9y agoTypesetters are wrong then.
- Dylan16807 9y ago> typesetters (e.g. my parents) will tell you that it is only considered correct in monospace fonts People like to say that but it's never been explained to my satisfaction. Spaces are twice as wide in a monospace font. Why would you use more spaces when and only when you have a longer space?
- alister 9y ago> Why would you use more spaces when and only when you have a longer space? I've also wondered this. Referring to this mock-up[1], I have the same monospace text with single vs double spaces after sentences, and proportional font with single vs double. The usual argument is that #2 is better than #1 (for mono), but #3 is better than #4 (for proportional). It feels like an inconsistency in the preference, and (as you pointed out) the reasoning doesn't make sense. [1] https://imgur.com/a/nozuw https://imgur.com/a/nozuw
- anjbe 9y agoIn TeX, inter‐sentence spaces are visibly wider than normal spaces, including those that come after abbreviations. And when justifying text, they stretch faster than spaces between words.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> This convention started with typewriters No, an em-width space between sentences with either half-em or third-em width space between words was typesettig convention for a long time before typewriters, and is where the triple (later double) spacing in typewritten manuscript convention came from. Typesetting convention evolved to narrower and eventually mostly settled on equal-to-interword spacing after that typewriter convention evolved from earlier typesetting convention.
- WovenTales 9y agoThere's an article I keep in my bookmarks for times like this: http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324 http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324 In short, wider sentence spacing goes back to the first English standards of the eighteenth century – including the first nine editions of the Chicago Manual of Style, and even the tenth still had it as an en-space – and only really started falling out of favour in the twenties. Typewriters had limited effect, but the automated typesetters that suceeded them were actually what killed it off, to simplify the programming. I typically do still type a single space, but I take full advantage of my preferred TeX flavour's (ConTeXt) automatic conversion to wider spaces. One successful, post-education convert here!
- quadrangle 9y agoMultiple hyphens are awful — learn to use your compose key!
- cryptonector 9y agoI like sticking to ASCII when I stick to English. (Of course, when I write in other languages, I use UTF-8.)
- anjbe 9y agoHere in New Mexico ñ is very common in place names. And I’ve known people with accented names who, though they don’t insist on it, appreciate (sometimes visibly brightening) when their names are spelled accurately.
- cryptonector 9y agoMy own name has an accent. I am always surprised when someone gets that right, but I don't insist on it.
- Symbiote 9y agoThat doesn't work outside America, where accents are often retained (café, façade, naïve) and £ or € is often needed.
- cryptonector 9y agoI'm OK with that. I'm in the U.S., and I comprehend my non-American English-speaking colleagues, but I don't try to be like them. The same should go the other way around. We're NOT going to standardize on one of the flavors of English -- variety is good.
- Symbiote 9y agoRecognize, however, that it does annoy those of us outside America when something very straightforward — like the ö in my friend's name, or writing £ — doesn't work. Imagine moving to a hypothetical country with no letter C, and being told your name "must" be kryptonektor, or instead seeing %ryptone%tor. It's fairly common for a lot of computer software to standardize on American English and American conventions, yet several of these are unique to under 1% of the world's population. This morning, a new installation of Microsoft Outlook asked for a location and timezone, yet still showed the weather for Washington DC in Fahrenheit above the calendar. The weather location was easily changed, but not the units. A well-known messaging app I installed last week shows my location as "K%©benhavn", for someone in Russia no character in the location is intelligible. A receipt from a restaurant in Europe has only about a 95% chance of correctly showing €, and maybe a 1/50 chance of showing the date in the wrong order. On an international flight between two non-English places, it's fairly common for the in-flight display to show miles and Fahrenheit with English, which I don't understand, and kilometres and Celsius with (say) Arabic, which I can't understand either — along with the other 99% of non-American connecting passengers. I have no issue with the minor spelling differences and changes of idiom. So yes, we mostly understand the Americans, except their measuring units and paper sizes. > The same should go the other way around. But it often doesn't.
- Bud 9y agoIt's actually the wrong way. Have you picked up a book lately? Apparently not.
- DanielKehoe 9y agoWhen the web was invented, we came to consensus there should be a single space after periods that close sentences in rendered HTML documents. You can see the original discussion, on the www-talk mailing list in July 1993 [1]. In the thread "Space after Periods," Terry Allen (an editor at O'Reilly) advocated for rendering more space after a period that closes a sentence than after a period that marks an abbreviation (in keeping with TeX and troff conventions). I proposed that, "A WWW document (which uses proportional fonts) should have the same space between sentences as between words" and cited as authority "Words into Type" and the "Chicago Manual of Style." in 1993, "WIT" and "Chicago" set standards for publishing much like RFCs do for the Internet. Terry Allen and I engaged in some snarky backbiting, then Ken Chang of NCSA Publications said he preferred "'one space fits all' as writers of HTML really shouldn't need to know the fineries of typography" and finally Guido van Rossum complained that, "extra space after a sentence... is mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff)" and implored, "Let's keep HTML simple!" If you don't like the way that browsers collapse spaces between sentences, you can blame me (and Ken Chang plus Guido van Rossum who clearly had issues with whitespace beyond Python). [1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.h...
- cryptonector 9y agoI've seen and participated in many such discussions. Reasonable people disagree: http://apvschicago.com/2011/05/em-dashes-and-ellipses-closed-or-spaced.html http://apvschicago.com/2011/05/em-dashes-and-ellipses-closed... Unreasonable people downvote.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoI take it you never went through a juvenile Kerouac phase? METHOD No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)--"measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech"--"divisions of the sounds we hear"-"time and how to note it down." (William Carlos Williams) --- http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouac-spontaneous.html http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouac-spontaneou... --- edit: I kid, but those notes never left my adult mind and come to play to a lesser degree in my consideration in structuring letters, comments, and larger writings. I think the style has its place.
- lwhi 9y agoI'm incredibly happy that the em dash is gaining the attention it deserves. However, if honest—I am also a little upset that the good people the comments section are tending towards placing white-space around each dash and the text it forms an abutment with. This space is not needed.
- Symbiote 9y agoThe space is conventional in Britain. Without the space looks strange to me. (Android users — try long pressing the - key in the punctuation menu.)
- lwhi 9y agoI disagree [1]; pick up a book that's been typeset, and look for an em dash. I doubt you'll see any spaces. [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/dash-and-em-dash https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/dash-and-em-dash
- Symbiote 9y agoWhen the dash (whatever type) is used to separate parts of a sentence, in British use there will be spaces either side. If Oxford is the exception, then I'm not surprised – they're the exception to many British writing styles. Admittedly, these examples look closer to en than em length. From some books and a magazine on my table: https://imgur.com/a/GNl2p https://imgur.com/a/GNl2p
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jfk13 9y agoIn my opinion — and let's face it, much of this is just a matter of opinion! — a normal space is too much. Try thin space (U+2009) for a more subtle effect. (The exact result may depend on your font, however.)
- cup-of-tea 9y agoNote that it is correctly typeset---as in the article---with no spaces around it.
- DamonHD 9y agoTwo dashes are an en dash or a range for me --- so 1--3 is my hyphen encoding count range!
- ReidZB 9y agoThat's how it works in TeX as well: one dash is a hyphen, two an en dash, three an em dash.
- cup-of-tea 9y agoAnd a fourth is the minus symbol, in maths mode $-$.
- evanb 9y agoNothing makes me crazier than seeing hyphen1 in TeX documents. hyphen != minus!
- DamonHD 9y agoThat's where I almost certainly picked up my habit from, though I haven't touched much (La)TeX in ~25Y. Rgds Damon
- steamer25 9y agoI try to avoid hyphen-based range notation. It's sometimes hard to tell if a single hyphen was intended to be a minus sign. Double hyphens look like ASCII em-dashes. I've never heard of of the triple convention and would be confused if you neglected an inline explanation. Here are some alternatives: * English: from 1 to 3 * Some programming languages: 1..3 * Math: [1, 3) I guess this also the main purpose of the en-dash* : http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html . The problem there is that en-dashes can be inaccessible as in my case--typing on a phone. * I actually originally missed your point because you forgot the hyphen between 'en' and 'dash'.
- dfee 9y agoI put spaces around mine. I’m not sure if that’s the norm — let alone correct usage — but it tends to help readers differentiate it as a non-compound word structure.
- alanfalcon 9y agohttp://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html
- cryptonector 9y agoYeah? So? First, it does not say that one must not use spaces around em dashes. Second, so what if it did? This is English we're talking about. The main rule of English is that there are no rules. If you want a rule for English: it's to speak and write in such a way as to be understood -- who would fail to understand the whitespace around an em dash?! Not I. But missing whitespace around an em dash can be confusing -- is that a compound? did the author mistype a hyphen? Ugly. Whitespace is nice. Use it.
- ashark 9y agoThere are rules to making oneself well- and easily-understood generally, and to appearing to be an educated writer to other educated people. If you care about neither of those things then sure, there are no rules.
- shawn 9y agoWrite like you talk, and usually you achieve both.
- abritinthebay 9y agoThere may not be rules but there are conventions. These conventions are rarely very strict but they do help communicate your ideas. Understanding them and understanding the impact of not using them is an important set of knowledge if you want to be clear and well understood in your writing. It is similar to good typography in that it isn't required but that it will often make the reader enjoy or understand the work more when reading. Obviously there have been many great writers who knew how and why they were breaking those conventions. E. E. Cummings was a notable example.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash. Horrible; if you are going to set a dash open and use it for the purpose of an em-dash, use an en-dash. Setting an em-dash open is ugly as hell. > I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens. Two-hyphens is conventional for an en-dash. Since a set-open en-dash serves the same purposes as an em-dash, a lot of people just use that instead of the three-hyphen conventional encoding of an em-dash. Some people use set-open hyphens on ASCII in place of dashes, which is actually probably the best thing in a monospace presentation but ugly in proportional fonts.
- colanderman 9y agoI agree with you but I think you have mistyped "em" as "en" is several places. EDIT: Fixed now.
- alanfalcon 9y agoSee what happens when people use en dashes when they mean to use em dashes? Total chaos!
- mort96 9y agoThere's such a thing as an en-dash too: http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html I don't know enough about punctuation to know whether he actually meant "em" when he wrote "en" in several places, but I'm going to assume he actually meant to refer to em-dashes some places, and en-dashes others.
- cryptonector 9y ago"you misspelled ..." is often a way to be funny. I suspect colanderman was making a point about em dashes being mo' better than en dashes.
- colanderman 9y agoNo, the GP literally mistyped (or had autocorrected) "em" as "en" in a couple locations. Fixed now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16089209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16089209).