In Defense of the Em Dash
Writers worry they overuse it. They shouldn’t — it’s awesome.
Writers love the em dash — but they all worry they overuse it.
I realized this last fall when I released Just The Punctuation, an app that lets you paste in a chunk of text and it strips out everything but the punctuation.
People started using it, which was fun! But a lot of writers began to tweet that they were ashamed of how many em dashes they used…
And others flat-out said they were terrified to use the tool, for fear of seeing how many em dashes they wrote.
Why do em dashes have such a bad rap for being overused? I’ve tried to find data on their actual incidence, to see whether they’ve become more insidiously deployed over time. Maybe digital publishing has created a genuine uptick in em dash overuse? Alas, I’ve not found anything. (If you do, email me at clive@clivethompson.net — love to hear!)
I think part of the shame comes from editors, who frequently chastise writers for using em dashes too freely. On the New York Times’ blog, Patrick LaForge argued that the overuse of em dashes can “tax readers’ patience.” Over at Slate, Noreen Malone worried that their overuse “discourages truly efficient writing.”
They’ve got a point. Some of the examples LaForge cites are quite clotted. Copy editors are wise to push back on stuff that is likely to annoy readers.
But the problem is… when it comes to me — not just as a writer, but as a reader — damn, I love em dashes! I love deploying them in my writing, and I love inhaling prose that uses them wittily, exuberantly, and frequently.
Maybe I’m out of step with most readers. Quite possibly.
But for the record, I thought about it and came up with six reasons to use tons of em dashes…
1. Em dashes feel slightly *anarchic*
People have a pretty good sense of the function of the various punctuation marks. The comma gives a short rest, while the semicolon joins two related…
