DASHES IN POEMS SERIES

It proposes a long pause - slightly longer than a parenthesis, significantly longer than aĬomma - that in a subtle way calls attention to itself as the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has remarked, dashes are primarily found in “genres that permit reference to be made to the act of composition, Is sometimes referred to as a “full stop,” and I think of the dash as fully a three-quarters stop. A well-placed dash adds energy and voice. So when should you use the dash? Writers who deploy this mark comfortably and adeptly (rather than haphazardly) are conscious of the rhythm and dynamics of a sentence. The Pauseĭash can take the place of a period, comma, semicolon - or nothing at all! The Parenthetical Dash can stand in for a pair of commas or parentheses. Thus the 1924 edition of her work renders the above stanza thisĪt the end of the first line, one can glimpse a comma-dash combo - a punctuational move that was a favorite of the Victorian age and went out of fashion not long after 1924.ĭickinson went a little jiggy with it, admittedly, but in poetry and prose alike, the dash is a freewheelin’ punctuation mark. Until very recently, Dickinson’s editors tended to convert her dashes into more standard punctuation marks, with distressingly homogenized results. I got my eye put out,” she punctuated the third stanza this way: In Dickinson’s original manuscript of her poem that begins “Before Uses dashes musically, but also to create a sense of the indefinite, a different kind of pause, an interruption of thought, to set off a list, as a semi-colon, as parentheses, or to link two thoughts together…” “Dashes are either long or short sometimes vertical, as if to indicate musical phrasing, and often elongated periods, as if to indicate a slightly different kind of pause.… Dickinson Not only was she inordinately fond of the dash, she wrought impressive variations on it.

The Nobel Laureate of this form of punctuation in poetry was Emily Dickinson. Quality, and in poetry, and is subject to no rules at all. This function shows up in dialogue (“I saw Bill yesterday - wait, is that a helicopter up there? - never mind”), in prose with a stream-of-consciousness Of equality-that everyone should be treated the same-an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence-that no one should be hurt.”) In addition, make sure dashes are placed in suchĪ way that, if the material within them is removed, the sentence still makes sense.Ī third purpose of dashes is to indicate disjointedness. Than that produces confusion about exactly what is meant to be set off by the dashes, as in this sentence from a well-known piece of social criticism: “While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise When using dashes this way, limit yourself to one pair per sentence. The second main category is the Parenthetical Dash, in which dashes are deployed in pairs and set off nonessential elements of the sentence.

Read in an interesting way, and I would like to emphasize it.” When using dashes this way, you are allowed only one per sentence. What you will read next relates to what you have just It more or less says to the reader, “Right here, I want you to take a breath. (Some publications, including this newspaper,ĭo not call a hyphen (-) a dash - as, for some reason, computer-support personnel feel compelled to do when they recite into the telephone the characters you are supposed to enter.ĭashes are used for two main purposes. Two hyphens into an unbroken line that’s roughly the width of a capital “M” - hence the official name of this punctuation mark, the em-dash. There are a few ways to do it, but generally, on a keyboard, you can do as follows: previous word/no space/two hyphens/no space/following word. As for rules, well, there are some guidelines, but not too many.įirst, make the thing the right way.

You can get a sense of the dash’s versatility from the above paragraph, every sentence of which employs at least one of them. That - unlike commas, periods, semicolons and all the others - doesn’t seem to be subject to any rules. That’s right - I’m talking about the horizontal line formed by typing two hyphens in a row. Let’s consider the most versatile piece of punctuation - the dash.

DASHES IN POEMS SERIES

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

Dashes in poems