The Art of the Em Dash and the Gradation of Sentence Breaks
Disambiguating periods, commas, semicolons, ellipses, parentheticals, and em dashes
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I heard a useful analogy recently for thinking about the different types of breaks in a sentence. The writer related the comma, semicolon, and period to the quarter note, half note, and whole note of music.
In the world of music, each note listed above is twice the duration of the one that precedes it: quarter, half, and whole.
The comma is the quarter note, indicating only a very short pause in the sentence structure. These are likely the most versatile bits of punctuation, serving roles in lists, addresses, dates, and occurring in almost every other sentence.
The semicolon is the half note, denoting a break that’s both larger than the comma and shorter than the period. With a niche few exceptions, the clauses separated by semicolons should each function as individual sentences. The two ideas should be so directly related that the second follows immediately from the first.
Periods are whole notes. They come with the largest pauses and represent the greatest shifts in an idea. Sometimes they represent the end of ideas completely.
