Em dashes — no spaces, please!

While many points of punctuation have hard and fast rules — for example, periods end sentences — the family of dashes is a bit wild. When should you use a dash? Which dash — the hyphen, double hyphen, triple hyphen, en dash, or em dash — is the right one?*

These days it seems that every new writer and online publication takes his/her/its own approach. The English language evolves, I get it. Style guides get written, rewritten, and deprecated. Devices like smartphones revolutionize communication. Sure, sure.

But please, new writers, stop using spaces around em dashes. They don’t belong there. The em dash is the longest dash. It creates an emphatic area around a phrase. It is the space. It doesn’t need spaces around itself.

Go ahead and put spaces around en dashes; use spaces with hyphens if you must. But leave the em dash closed.

I’m not just a cranky old editor with an axe to grind. Almost every authority agrees with me on this point: The Chicago Manual of Style, APA, New Hart’s Rules, all the Canadian style guides, and even the Australian government. In fact, pretty much every style guide except the (regrettably widely used) AP advocates for closed em dashes.

So if in doubt or starting out, go with the majority consensus — no spaces around em dashes.

Ironically, here on Medium closed em dashes are converted to open ones for the convenience of copy/paste. Definitely ruining my point here.

*Which to use? The em dash strengthens emphasis when it replaces a colon, commas, or parentheses; it is used to set off a quotation from its attribution; and when you want to swear but can’t, the em dash fills the f — ck in. Hyphens fit between words and at line breaks. En dashes go between numbers and date ranges or can substitute with spaces for an em dash. The double and triple hyphen is a typewriting convention for those without access to special characters or when writing drafts.