Excessive dashing is wretched — the unholy destruction of modern English. In fact employing too many dashes transforms — modern English — into — postmodern English. Sentences that once flowed logically and succinctly suddenly break — for no reason. Language becomes an indecipherable pastiche of random phrases — separated by dashes. Indeed if you’ve read this paragraph you can see the problem with overusing the dash — it severs thoughts — and under thinking sentences.
Like a virus a single dash enters a body of work then grows and multiplies until the body of respectable prose is incapacitated with dashitis. The reason we are singling out excessive dashing is partially because the Graphic is a huge offender and partially because postmodern English poses such a great threat.
To bring this closer to home we’re going to discuss it in terms of Pepperdine’s first year seminar — we’ve all been through it. Remember that one guy in your class who drew attention to himself through excessive participation?
At the beginning of the year he seems great. He gets discussion rolling. His comments are not particularly insightful but they seem logically founded. On top of all that he looks like he’s not trying at all. He flashes casual yet slick looks. You have to admit you’re kind of impressed.
Little did you know that a few classes into the semester he would transform into a nightmare. As time goes by his comments seem to relate less and less to the material and he seems to say the same thing over and over again. You shudder every time he opens his mouth. Everything you once kind of liked about him now annoys you like Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” You soon realize he hasn’t actually read but is just suave enough to turn his laziness into a façade of knowledge. He is the dash.
The dash comes in two forms the em-dash (—) and the en-dash (–). They have basically the same function and the choice between them as well as the spacing guidelines depends on the publishing house or style guide of the writer. For example we at the Graphic use the em-dash with a space on either side.
The grammatical cousin of the dash pair is the hyphen (-) mischievous because of its unstandardized use. The hyphen typically joins compound nouns. It can also string together multiple adjectives before all-too-modifiable nouns. The bottom line is the hyphen is a joiner a connecter. Like any good business major it networks pulling words together.
Not so the dash! Granted the dash has its place. Indeed the best and worst thing about the dash is that it serves so many purposes. It can separate or join clauses and phrases in a sentence. It can replace commas or parentheses around incidental phrases and it can appear at the end of a truncated thought to express a break in dialogue. It can even replace a colon to dress down writing. In fact it is difficult to use the dash incorrectly.
For this reason the dash has run wild. Like the cheetah that has escaped from the zoo the dash needs to be recaptured and put back in its proper place — a cage.
The dash has become the preferred punctuator of fearful writers too concerned with making mistakes by using other punctuation wrongly to investigate the merits of other marks. It is also the pet mark of writers who want to sound conversational and avoid stuffy punctuation. These writers litter their work with the easy-to-use dash and end up doing a disservice to themselves and literature. We encourage students to explore more effective punctuation.
Options exist: Have courage with the comma the colon and the semicolon. They all have concrete rules that once learned are not difficult to follow; they make your writing more sophisticated. Replacing a dash with a properly used semicolon is like upgrading from Jack in the Box to Geoffrey’s.
The truth is overusing many punctuation marks devalues what is being said. Excessive semicolons make a writer sound like he or she is from the 17th century. Excessive colons turn an essay into a grocery list. Commas and periods are somewhat exceptional. They must be used frequently for any prose to flow properly.
The dash — a respectable mark on its own when used sparingly — is on the verge of becoming absolutely meaningless. Consistent with postmodernism in general the postmodern English excessive dashing conveys no real meaning. The trick is to be intentional and tasteful in your choice of punctuation. It’s there to bolster not diminish the quality of writing.
