I think my college newspaper experience has made me a little obsessive about writing – style, format, and clarity. My job requires reading a ton of writing done by programmers, and this group, to put it gently, is the writing equivalent of a bull in a china shop. So I post this in hopes that I can fix at least one technical writing problem with this simple rule. Always use the en-dash.
One issue I’ve been obsessing about lately is the use of dashes. Specifically, when to just hit the ‘-’ key, or (on Mac) hold down option as well to get an ‘en-dash’, or do the option-shift-dash dance to get the ‘em-dash’ (by the way I have no idea how these work on the PC, but I remember something about F-keys, aagh!). I finally decided to research the issue, and found out it’s actually very simple. At least according to Wikipedia.
The em dash, or m dash, m-rule, etc., (—), indicates a parenthetical thought—like this one—or some similar interpolation. Its name derives from its defined width of one em (originally the width of the letter m), which is the length, expressed in points, by which font sizes are typically specified.
Traditionally an em dash—like so—or a spaced em dash — like so — has been used for a dash in running text. The Elements of Typographic Style recommends the more concise spaced en dash – like so – and argues that the length and visual magnitude of an em dash “belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography”. The spaced en dash is also the house style for certain major publishers (Penguin, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge among them).
The en dash (always with spaces, in running text) and the spaced em dash both have a certain technical advantage over the unspaced em dash. In most typesetting and most word processing, the spacing between words is expected to be variable, so there can be full justification. Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables this for the words between which it falls. The effect can be uneven spacing in the text.
So programmers, the dash is for hyphenation or a minus sign. Only use it as such. For a parenthetical thought, use the en-dash – option-dash on the Mac. See how nice that en-dash is?
Interesting summary of the em vs. en “dashes”. Your suggestions—nicely tied to classical examples and modern guidelines—on the use of these entities makes good sense when writing prose. However, do we really want to pollute our source code with semi-standard ASCII codes? Would it be wise to include the – or — in a plain text file which may make the rounds between Mac, Windows and UNIX machines? I suppose that if all users involved strictly adhere to UTF encoding it might work– however, I think that garbled characters will be the actual result.
As an alternative—alternatives are always a nice addition to criticism— the LATEX approach should be adopted by coders that need some extra expressiveness in their work:
This represents the best of both worlds: style and compatibility.
Since it looks like your blogging software automatically converts ‘—’ (three minus sign characters) into the — character, here is the direct link to the LATEX markup page I quoted:
http://www.noao.edu/noaoprop/help/latex.html
I hope it didn’t sound like I was suggesting using em or en-dashes in source code. I agree with using two regular dashes to simulate an en-dash in that case. Thanks for pointing it out.
Ah.. Apologies then! I thought that you were advocating their use in source code.