I was taught a thin space before and after, currently I am using no additional spacing (especially in this blog where a thin space is not available. Spacing around em dashes: this is wide open to personal opinion. In fact, it is one of the sure signs of amateurism. This is an embarrassing error to professionals. Typewriters use a double hyphen for the em dash. In many ways they are very helpful-but traditionalists tend to have knee-jerk reactions to anything outside the grammar books (written decades ago). In many cases, there are no rules anymore. These changes have accelerated in recent years. Other than that, there is no standard anymore.Īmerican English is a living language in constant flux. Grammatically it is stronger than a comma but weaker than a period. The keystroke for an em-dash is Option+Shift+Hyphen (PC: Ctrl+Alt+Num–). This is the typographer’s decision to make.Įm dash: This dash is an em long. It seemed to me to be easier to read and more understandable written as one–twenty-fourth with the en dash between the one and twenty-fourth. Last week, when talking about the width of a hair space for InDesign was one example. The keystroke for an en-dash is Option+Hyphen (PC: Ctrl+Num–).Ī special case: In rare cases, hyphens and en dashes need to be mixed for clarity. It is a typo to use a hyphen in these cases. It is used with numbers, spans, or ranges. So, you have a couple keystrokes to learn because en and em dashes are used quite a bit during the creation of normal copy.Įn dash: This dash is an en long. In fact, hyphens are used in no other places. For example, 10-point is the normal point size for book publishers’ body copy. Hyphen: This is the character used to hyphenate words at the end of a line and to create compound words. All three have very specific usage rules. Type has three-the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. The next major change we need to discuss is dashes.
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