What You Can Now Accomplish with an Em Dash

• Author: George D. Gopen
• Position: The author is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University.
• Pages: 13-14

On the Papers

Published in Litigation, Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2019. © 2019 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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GEORGE D. GOPEN

The author is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University.

An em dash

—

a double-length hyphen,

taking up as much width as the letter M

—

was once considered as shameful a sin in

formal discourse as slang or contractions.

When I was attending the once-and-still-

wondrous Roxbury Latin School (founded

in 1645), some 60 years ago, had I used

this hyper-hyphen punctuation mark (see

the previous sentence for an example of a

pair of them at work), I would have been

sent straightaway to the headmaster’s of-

fice to be reprimanded for my act of moral

turpitude. I might as well have slapped

the English master in the face. All that

has changed now; but it took a good long

time to change. This On the Papers essay

explains both how it happened and what

excellent use you can make of this new

best punctuational friend.

(Historical note: The worst four-letter

word my classmates and I could ever have

used in a writing assignment was “ain’t,” it

being both slang and a contraction.)

The em dash has been nurtured in

formal prose for a long enough time that

we can now announce rules for its usage.

While many grammarians love rules for

the sake of order, and have their red pens

always at the ready to quell disorder, I re-

joice when a new arrival like the em dash

gives writers better ways to send interpre-

tive signals to their readers.

Successful new rules for writing come

about in much the same way as successful

legislation happens. We have long learned

that it often does not work well to formu-

late legislation in order to change people’s

behavior. The most glaring example is our

14-year experiment with Prohibition. No,

laws work better when they simply articu-

late and codify what public behavior has

already become. Enough traffic accidents

at a given intersection may lead to the in-

sertion of a new traffic light.

The em dash started to creep into use,

to my memory, in the late 1960s, that era

when all sorts of disregard for authority

became matters of public behavior. Fiction

writers were allowed to get away with

them, especially in passages of dialogue,

as they looked to approximate stylistic re-

ality. Journalists found good reasons to in-

clude them. Without anyone particularly

noticing it, form followed function: As cer-

tain things became useful, they slowly as-

sumed a rightful place in writing. When

grammar books started taking note (and

you can check this out on the internet’s

definitions of the em dash even today), the

newfound usage was merely considered

a victory for informality over formality.

Actually, it has become far more than that.

Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all used

the same kind of progression of materi-

als in their music when writing many of

the brisk, major movements in sympho-

nies and sonatas. They had no name for it:

It just worked well for them. Years later,

composers and musicologists gave that

form a name — sonata allegro form — and

disquisissed at length about its rules. It is

now time for us to look back at how the

em dash has been used and articulate the

three helpful things we can now do with it.

Lists

The first concerns the formation of lists.

We used to have an extraordinarily ba-

roque punctuation rule for lists: Introduce

your formal list with a colon; then sepa-

rate the list members from each other by

commas UNLESS one of the members it-

self has an internal comma, IN WHICH

CASE you then separate the members by

semicolons. (Whew!) We no longer need

this, because we now have two completely

separate ways of constructing lists.

If the list’s members each need to be

allowed a certain amount of weight and

emphasis, introduce the list with a colon

and separate the members with semico-

lons. Both of those marks of punctuation (I

call the structural location to which they

give closure “stress positions”) invite the

reader to give a separate moment of atten-

tion and value to each list member.

In order to go forward with this pur-

chase, we must prepare ourselves by

A ONCE ROGUE

PU NCTUATION MARK

GAINS RESPECTABILITY:

WHAT YOU CAN NOW

ACCOMPLISH WITH AN

EM DASH