There are fourteen punctuation marks in the English language. (Actually, there are fifteen if you count the interrobang, heh.) My favourite punctuation mark is the dash.
Not to be mistaken for a hyphen (which is used within a word: She hit the tennis ball cross-court), the dash allows you to add additional information at the end—or middle—(see what I did there?) of a sentence. Dashes are also used to show a range of items. For example, Easter weekend is April 18–21 this year.
There are two types of dashes: the em dash and the en dash. The em dash is longer—the width of a capital M—and the en dash is … well, I think you get the idea. (It’s the width of a capital N.) At copy editing school (okay, it was a class), I was taught that either an em or en dash could be used to add additional thoughts to a sentence. (A closed en dash is reserved for things like number ranges.)
So I chose to use a spaced en dash; I liked the look of it, even though I’d noticed that book publishers tended to use an em dash with no spaces. I consulted Chicago on this and, low and behold, they do not support the use of the en dash for adding additional thoughts to a sentence. It was time for CopyEditCat to—gasp!—change her ways.
Thus you’ll notice that my earlier posts use a spaced en dash, and my more recent posts use an em dash without spaces. Who says a cat can’t change her spots?
To make an en dash, simultaneously press the control key and the minus sign key on your number pad (ctrl/-). The em dash is ctrl/alt/-.