Chip,
I’ve noticed a lot more dashes sprinkled through copy lately — a dash of this, a dash of that.
Could you refresh our memories on when dashes are appropriate — and when they’re not?
Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!
Thanks!
Doug Ross
Editorial Page Editor
Dear Doug,
Thanks. You’re the first to “Ask Chip.”
Let’s start by defining the term.
What is the dash for, anyway?
A dash ( — ) is a punctuation device that connects (or separates) phrases and sentences. Not to be confused with its shorter cousin, the hyphen ( – ) which connects (or separates) individual words.
The dash has its fans (those who overuse it) and its detractors (those whose sentences wouldn’t be caught dead with a dash lurking within).
Since most newsrooms pledge allegiance to “The Associated Press Stylebook” (2004), I consulted it first, along with the companion “Associated Press Guide to Punctuation” (2003). (All examples, save for the last one, taken from style guides.)
According to these revered texts, the dash comes to the rescue in a number of scenarios, from the dramatic to the mundane.
- Break in Thought or Abrupt Change.
Smith offered a plan — it was unprecedented — to raise revenues.
- Appositives. Reserved for those times when adding a related phrase and “commas would be too feeble.”
- Summaries, Lists.
Jones gave the following reasons:
— He never ordered the package.
— If he did, it didn’t come.
— If it did, he sent it back.
- Finale. To pump up the final word of a clause of a sentence.
- Interruption. Dash to signify an interrupted quote.
A. Well, I didn’t intend to —
Q. I asked about your action, not your intent.
- Attribution.
— Julie Moos, my former editor
That’s six possible uses, which may explain why editor Ross detects a deluge of dashes. Even so, the AP punctuation guide advises restraint: one pair of dashes or a single dash per sentence.
But I wanted to see what other style experts had to say on the subject.
A prominent dash fan is William Zinnser, author of the classic writing text “On Writing Well.”
Among those:
- One dash to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you should have stated in the first part.
- A pair of dashes to set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. Matching dashes cradle an explanatory detail instead of sending it off into the cold world with its own sentence. That way an explanatory detail that might have needed its own sentence.
Surprisingly, Lynne Truss, the best-selling British fusspot who took a “Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” in her best-seller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” goes easy on the dash.
She acknowledges that dash is “nowadays seen as the enemy of grammar, partly because overtly disorganized thought is the mode of email and (mobile phone) text, communication.”
Even so, Truss writes, “the dash does an annoyingly good job in these contexts standing in for other punctuation marks.” It’s easy to use.
“I saw Jim — he looked gr8 — have yu seen him?”
And what’s more, periods and commas in modern typefaces are tiny, “whereas the handsome horizontal dash is a lot harder to miss.”
My days with the dash
As far as I can tell, I first encountered the dash in 1989. I was a newly minted national correspondent in the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington bureau. I vividly remember the first time a story of mine arrived in the queue of my editor, Bob Shaw, who had been a legendary capitol correspondent for the Miami Herald in Talahassee, Florida.
I’d spent most of my career writing narratives, which meant I was spared the challenge of the nut graf, that nugget of authoritative and analytical prose that summed up the heart of the story in graf 3-5. Narratives generally left it up to the reader to decide why the story mattered.
Faced with the task of writing nut grafs for breaking news and trend pieces in the nation’s capital, I first tried what a lot of reporters do with the device: I buried it as deep as it could go. Perhaps no one would take issue, or even notice, my tentative attempts to tackle the question that good stories answer — “What the heck is this story about?”
The first time Shaw edited one of my stories, I watched over his shoulder. He scanned it, and then stopped. I cringed when he stopped at my veiled attempt to set forth a hypothesis. He copied the graf, made a space for it after the first few grafs. He paused, and then keystroked a dash, followed by a phrase that gleamed with economy and thematic power, bringing it to a close with the same punctuation mark that started the whole thing.
Over the next few weeks, Shaw would repeat the action, until finally it occurred to me that he wasn’t going to stop, so I might as well adopt the dash as my own.
I grew to love the dash. It created a container for details, synthesis and, riskiest of all, enabled me to come as close to opinions that I had ever written, but those buttressed by the best evidence I could marshal. It promoted economy, a characteristic prized by the clients of the Knight Ridder wire who viewed 800 word stories as epic journalism, but valued nut grafs as an early warning system about the point of a story, such as this one about pre-teen dieting.
In trying to correct one problem — one in five children is now overweight — doctors, parents, schools and the media have unwittingly caused another.
And this one about kids who get shot and live.
So, how useful is the dash?
Lately, I’ve begun to find dashes wanting. When I read a sentence with a dashal phrase, it seems a jarring interruption that makes cognitive processing a challenge. I’ve begun backing off, using commas, or, better yet, periods. What used to nestle between dashes now is more likely to become its own sentence.
I’ll give the last word on the topic to Pat Walters, a Naughton Fellow who has been editing me for the past several months.
“Seems to me that the dash can be a cop out — an excuse for not using a period or, in this case, a comma. I bet if I went back over a page of my writing, I could convert all the dashes and parentheses to periods and commas; I might need a semi-colon or two.”
Now what’s the rule about semi-colons, anyway?
