“The dash is an invitation to the reader to make meaning,” Dr. Smith said. “It can also be a leap of faith.” Grammarians don’t necessarily see it that way.Mary Norris, the New Yorker’s ...

The dash is the Kim Kardashian of punctuation marks: misplaced, over-exposed, shamelessly self-promoting, always eager to elbow out her jealous sisters the comma, colon, and semicolon.

Semicolons to link clauses make sentences longer and less readable with nothing to gain except a chance for the writer to show off her knowledge of semicolons. Rude. Dashes, colons and commas have ...

As readers and writers, we’re intimately familiar with the dots, strokes and dashes that punctuate the written word. The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing ...

So why not try for a trifecta: a proposal that we restore the undervalued semicolon to its proper place in journalism – ahead of the dash.

A dash is expressed as an "em dash" ( — ) in printing, is expressed in plain text as two hyphens ( -- ) and is used in place of a comma, colon or semicolon for greater emphasis. It denotes a major ...

A period or possibly a semicolon would be better. But not everyone agrees with me. News publications usually put a space on either side of an em dash — making it sort of float.

I just finished my poetry thesis last week, and I’m embarrassed to admit the number of times I changed periods to commas, replaced colons with dashes, and struck out semicolons—only to ...