Day 230: Use the em dash to create emphasis.

The em dash (the long dash) has two uses. First, you can use it to interject comments into your sentences, which we discussed already. Second, you can use it to make an impact statement at the end of a sentence. The em dash causes the reader to pause slightly, so whatever follows it will have more emphasis. Consider this sentence.

“The play was wonderful—if you like amateur performances.”

In this sample, the em dash will make the reader pause and, therefore, will put heavy emphasis on the final phrase. When using this technique, the text after the em dash needs to be some form of impact statement or the technique will fail. Here is another example.

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“The driver swerved to the right—accidentally.”

Most word processors will convert two hyphens to an em dash. Some plain text word processors can’t, in which case two hyphens will be acceptable. For formal documents, though, use an em dash.