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I Pause; Therefore I Am
The Feminist Power of Punctuation
I love to use dashes in my writing and probably use way more than necessary, but sometimes the pasta boils over and I have to dash back to the stove, leaving me mid-thought. Hence — the dash, the interruption of thought. The pasta must be al dente.
Writing can wait. Family dinner cannot.
I see the dash as a perfect reflection of my life — a domestic pause to take care of family business until I get the time to plunge back into my work.
It captures the incomplete, the uncertain, the sudden shifts in direction that so often characterize being a female writer. Where a period feels final like the thought was complete (which it wasn’t), the dash gives me space to continue where I left off before I was interrupted by life’s demands — the moment when the words come tumbling back, half-formed yet insistent, demanding to be captured before they slip away again.
The dash is a bridge between the past and present thought, an invitation to return and reimagine what was left unfinished.
Maybe this is why gynocritics, (yes, there is such a thing) like Elaine Showalter saw the dash as part of what makes women’s writing distinct — a kind of female punctuation.
