Dashes

Dashes are a flexible and useful way of punctuating your writing—if not overused, they can give prose a punchy, vigorous feel. Dashes can act as semi-colons, connecting independent clauses. They can take the place of colons in introducing lists. They can serve to insert an example, and allow you gracefully to get back to the main sentence. You can also use them at any point in a grammatical structure when you feel a pause would be appropriate:

　　During Machiavelli's lifetime, Italy as a single political entity did not exist—instead, there was a patchwork of little city-states, petty kingdoms, republics, duchies, and ecclesiastical states, constantly at war with each other.

　　The texts students read, the kind of thinking necessary to work through complex arguments, and what students must do to show adequate mastery of the material—all lead naturally to an emphasis on critical thinking and writing skills.

　　Hyphens （-） and dashes （—） are different creatures. Hyphens connect separate words into compounds （shoo-in, a run-of-the-mill transaction）, or break a word at the end of a line （which should not be done in college essays）:

WRONG
RIGHT

In Coriolanus, Sicinius and Brutus are the tribunes of the people-the voice of the people.
In Coriolanus, Sicinius and Brutus are the tribunes of the people—the voice of the people.

　　Any word processor can produce a dash. In Microsoft Word on PCs the key sequence is CTRL ALT the numeric keypad's minus sign （at the far right）. In Microsoft Word on Macs, the key sequence is OPTION SHIFT the hyphen key. However you produce it, don't put spaces on either side of the dash. （If you must denote a dash by typing two hyphens together （——）, you should put spaces around them to keep them from being broken at the end of a line by a word processor.）

　　Dashes often come in pairs. If you want to signal an interruption in a grammatical structure with a dash, you've got to keep track of the grammatical structure, and signal the return to the main structure with a second dash. Some examples of the proper use of dashes will help to make this clear:

　　Many 19th-century American writers—Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Poe chief among them—saw themselves as pioneers discovering or inventing a new kind of literature.

　　The American presidency—revered, historic, powerful—is in trouble.

　　Machiavelli, obsessed with warfare—an obsession that one finds in all his writings, even his poems and plays—reflected the anarchy and insecurity of Renaissance Italy.

　　In each case, note that if we take out the dashes and all the words they contain, what is left stands as a complete sentence （but note that if we did this in the last sentence we'd have to add a comma after warfare）.

　　Somewhat like colons, dashes are flexible enough to let you play with word order to create interesting sentences. You can present a list and then summarize it:

　　"[D]istress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude"—Nietzsche paints human life as a ceaseless stream of suffering （917）.