#Popular poems contaiing dashes full
#Popular poems contaiing dashes series

In Gore Vidal’s Burr, the title character complains-in a charming internal monologue-“Why am I using so many dashes? Like a schoolgirl. Henry Fielding apparently rewrote his sister Sarah’s work heavily to edit out some of her idiosyncrasies-chief among them, a devotion to the dash. According to the essay “ Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation“ from a 1993 edition of The Emily Dickinson Journal-a true general-interest read!-“Dickinson’s excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit.” Can there really be-at the risk of sounding like a troglodyte-something feminine about the use of a dash, some sort of lighthearted gossamer quality? Compare Dickinson’s stylistic flitting with the brutally short sentences of male writers-Hemingway, for instance-who, arguably, use their clipped style to evoke taciturn masculinity. Perhaps the most famous dash-user in history-though she didn’t use the em dash conventionally-was Emily Dickinson.

As for what I think of his observation-well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.) Don’t you find it annoying-and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt-when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White-who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one-counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment-and with such shocking frequency-on these more simple forms of punctuation-the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague-arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone-told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. It also-and this might be its worst sin-disrupts the flow of a sentence. The problem with the dash-as you may have noticed!-is that it discourages truly efficient writing.

#Popular poems contaiing dashes full

What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options-sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment-in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash-if done right-let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences? What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask?-or so I like to imagine. America’s finest prose-in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels-is littered with so many dashes among the dots it’s as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon-and yet in practical usage, we do.

#Popular poems contaiing dashes series

According to the Associated Press Stylebook- Slate’s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related-there are two main prose uses-the abrupt change and the series within a phrase-for the em dash.