The Em Dash Paradox

For my proofreading, copyediting friends – did I get it right?

I’m a natural em dash kind of person—always nudging my way in with my two arms outspread—longest in the family of horizontal punctuations.

I won’t change.

The fifth of ten children, I was born with siblings on either side of me—like a verb, say, framed by nouns and adjectives. I was a middle kid—a fulcrum—in the middle of a long sentence of 10 siblings.

Were they holding me up or holding me in? Was I reaching out to them or holding them an arm’s length either side? Either way, I’m comfortable with meaning streaming out or streaming in from both arms—all the time. I feel connected to the letter this way.

None of this stand-alone punctuation with space on one side. I’m from a big Italian family where arms are always moving out to connect, communicate with breathless immediacy. Overnight the arms that kept siblings—before and after me—at a safe distance, became punctuation to hold them together, a conductor to connect the full meaning flowing through me to them.

I’m a natural for this horizontal distance of the em-dash. I love to run, swim, bicycle flat roads never stopping until I get to the next word. My arms like to move until they caress the next word—em dash people are warm and expressive.

This is the em-dash paradox—we support an indispensable thought and at the same time are an add-on you’ll lose in a space pinch and never miss.

We lack the ego of a comma, which is always clearly called for and irreplaceable. In fact, we em dashes radiate such energy, we require a lot of space in a sentence and are asked to leave the room and let a comma do our job when the kerning gets tight.

Opposites attract, though, which is why you’ll never find more than one set of em dash arms in a sentence.

But we like our complement, the comma, a cool character with its retreating, curled-in-on-itself look—it holds words behind to its left, but always, always needs a breathing space afterward.

Sentences with em dashes remind me of the hummingbird bird in flight—you think it’s changing its mind about where it wants to be in relation to the goal, the feeder, when it does a sort of sharp zigzag. Just like me when I shuffle a thought mid-stream—on the way to nectar-sweet meaning.

The sentence may appear uncertain but it’s not. Nor is the hummingbird.

You can’t delete the em-dash, anymore than you can delete the hummingbird’s flight pattern—or any instinctual behavior in the universe.