In Defense of the Em Dash
Writers worry they overuse it. They shouldn’t — it’s awesome.
Writers love the em dash — but they all worry they overuse it.
I realized this last fall when I released Just The Punctuation, an app that lets you paste in a chunk of text and it strips out everything but the punctuation.
People started using it, which was fun! But a lot of writers began to tweet that they were ashamed of how many em dashes they used…
And others flat-out said they were terrified to use the tool, for fear of seeing how many em dashes they wrote.
Why do em dashes have such a bad rap for being overused? I’ve tried to find data on their actual incidence, to see whether they’ve become more insidiously deployed over time. Maybe digital publishing has created a genuine uptick in em dash overuse? Alas, I’ve not found anything. (If you do, email me at clive@clivethompson.net — love to hear!)
I think part of the shame comes from editors, who frequently chastise writers for using em dashes too freely. On the New York Times’ blog, Patrick LaForge argued that the overuse of em dashes can “tax…
