—He thinks quotation marks look fussy.
—OK, as long as the reader can tell who is speaking.
—It can create a sense of drama—false drama.
—It can be used within dialogue in place of a semicolon, and it is actually more realistic—most people don’t think in semicolons.
—It can work as a defiant alternative to a period at the end—
—It can end a sentence abruptly to show that a thought has been inter—
—rupted. It can pick up where you left off.
With the switch to cold type, in the mid-1980s, copy editors were frustrated by the inability of the computer to recognize the dash as a legitimate piece of punctuation that needed to be connected to the word before it—the dash was routinely bumped down to the next line. Maybe this is a hangover of the preference, in some parts, for inserting a space on either side of the double hyphen: the spaced dash. We copy editors struggled like Atlas to hold each dash up there at the end of the line where it belonged. You would never kick a comma or a semicolon or a colon or a period down to the next line. (Well, unless the period in a dot-com falls at the end of a line and looks like the end of a sentence. The New York Times made the interesting decision to move that dot down to the beginning of the next line.) The Times freely sets dashes at the beginning of a line. Readers are used to it. I myself got tired of lobbying the makeup department to squeeze in the dash—I knew they all thought I was the world’s biggest fussbudget. Now that word-processing programs have made us a nation of desktop publishers, we can do it ourselves.
_______
There are writers who despise the dash. The sheer range of its use suggests that it’s a lazy, all-purpose substitute for more disciplined forms of punctuation. Women seem to use it a lot, especially in correspondence, as if it were a woman’s prerogative to stop short without explanation, to be a little vague, to have a sudden change of heart, to leave things open-ended. A friend of mine once swept aside all rules governing punctuation by saying, “Whenever you feel a pause, you put in a dash.”
A reliance on dashes can feel breathless, but it can also be moving, as in this note that Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Richard Nixon in response to his letter of condolence after the assassination of President Kennedy:
I know how you must feel—so long on the path—so closely missing the greatest prize—and now for you, all the question comes up again—and you must commit all you and your family’s and hopes and efforts again—Just one thing I would say to you—if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long—please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family—
If a copy editor had standardized Jackie’s punctuation, the note to Nixon would look like this:
I know how you must feel: so long on the path, so closely missing the greatest prize. And now, for you, all the question comes up again, and you must commit all you and your family’s hopes and efforts again. Just one thing I would say to you: if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long, please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family.
The conventionally punctuated version gives the prose the appearance of being tightly under control, buttons buttoned, snaps snapped, and jaw clamped shut. Jackie’s dashes are spontaneous and expressive, full of style and personality. Dashes often come in pairs, like commas or parentheses, and then they have to be coordinate; that is, after the second dash, the sentence has to pick up where it was suspended before the first dash. A sentence with more than two dashes can be ungainly, if not confusing. But in this case who cares if the dashes are not coordinate?