The Year of the Em Dash
It’s absolutely a tragedy how many people are just cruising through 2014 completely unaware that this is the year of the em dash. Summer will soon be upon us, fade into fall, and the holidays will come and go and the vast majority of Americans will be living their lives a lie, absent in the moment, living like they’re completely unaware of how vital this year is to advanced punctuation.
Wait. What’s an em dash?
The em dash…often demarcates a break of thought or some similar interpolation stronger than the interpolation demarcated by parentheses…
In other words, it’s way longer than a hyphen. Something like this:
I was on my way to store—nevermind that the store should have come to me, after all I am the customer—when I realized that I have no money, for I am a freelance writer.
The em dash is represented in Unicode by the sequence 2014.
Now you know. Don’t let life slip away, before you know it we’ll be living in the Year of the Horizontal Bar. And no one wants that.
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