Comma Sense Editing
  • Home
  • Services and Fees
  • Client Testimonials & Portfolio
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Home
  • Services and Fees
  • Client Testimonials & Portfolio
  • Contact
  • Blog

DASH IT ALL!

3/28/2014

0 Comments

 
One of the more common mistakes I see with writers is the use (or misuse) of dashes and ellipsis. When do you use ellipsis? And when do you use hyphens or the longer em dashes?

Here are the rules, as followed by The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) and most publishers:

Use the longer em dash to indicate faltering or interrupted speech. Here are some examples from CMS:

 “Will he—can he—obtain the necessary signatures?” asked Mill.

“Well, I don’t know,” I began tentatively. “I thought I might—”

“Might what?” she demanded.

CMOS also says that if the break belongs to the surrounding sentence rather than to the quoted material, the em dashes must appear outside the quotation marks, as such:

“Someday he’s going to hit one of those long shots, and”—his voice turned huffy—“I won’t be there to see it.”

The em dash, by the way, can be obtained in Word either when you write two dashes and immediately after write a letter, or by holding down the control and alt keys and the dash on the upper right hand corner of the keypad.

The smaller hyphen is used when just a word is incomplete, as when a character is stuttering: “I d-don’t kn-know what to th-think.”

Ellipses, however, are often used when the character is stammering, but the words are complete, as in: "I ... I don't know what to think."

You can use a combination in a sentence:

“Why ... why don’t you dr-drive a bit more ca-carefully?”

Just be careful you aren't driving a reader crazy! The above sentence, to my taste,  has too much going on, and is hard to read. It may slow the story down. I would have pared some of these away, as they make it a bit more difficult for the reader.

There’s a school of thought that would eliminate ellipsis, which have become rather overdone in writing today. For one thing, most writers use them incorrectly, when they should be using em dashes or commas. For another, if a writer uses them too much (as in every other sentence of dialogue) they become an annoying visual roadblock for readers. And, finally, they indicate weak dialogue.

“Ummm…what do you think…should I do it?”

“Hmmm…well…I don’t know.”

“Yeah…I better think about it…at least a bit more.”

Maybe real people talk like that, with pauses. But this is amazingly boring dialogue (not to mention that some of those ellipses should really be commas). If you are writing snappy, fresh dialogue, you probably won’t need many ellipses.

So next time, before you type those three little dots, think about what you really need, and whether there’s a better way to write that piece of dialogue.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Lourdes Venard is a freelance editor and copyediting instructor.

    Archives

    February 2020
    July 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    July 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    March 2015
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014

    Categories

    All
    Characters
    Dashes
    Dialogue
    Editing
    Grammar
    Hyphens
    Mystery Writing
    Pantser
    Plotter
    Write What You Know
    Writing Advice
    Writing Books

    RSS Feed

 © 2010–2021 Comma Sense Editing, LLC. The Comma Sense Editing website and logo are owned by Lourdes Venard. All rights are reserved, including the right to reproduce the logo, photos, or any material on this website in any form, including by copying or scanning, on audio or video, or other electronic methods.