Back when I wrote twenty-page letters on lilac-scented stationery—yes, I’m that old—a friend pointed out that I used more dashes than periods. Dashes still pepper my informal writing—see the previous sentence—oops, I can’t stop!--because they enable us to capture the irregular ebb and flow of ordinary conversation with all its starts and stops and interruptions and about-faces.
Dickens knew this when he gave Esther Summerson her voice in Bleak House: “It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays—none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another—there were none on mine.” If Dickens were writing today, he’d probably use but’s or periods instead, but I like the dashes—they highlight the contrast between the other girls’ lives and Esther’s. She continues to define herself by what she is not, set off by dashes: “I was brought up, from my earliest remembrances—like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming—by my godmother.”
Contemporary novelist David Mitchell uses dashes to add urgency to the opening scene of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a chilling and graphic depiction of a childbirth gone wrong:
“She’s barely spoken”—the maid holds the lamp—“for hours and hours....”
“What you say”—the honest doctor wavers—“may well be true.”
“If you can discover that without cutting the arm”—Maeno means “amputate”—“do so.”
By using dashes to set off the speaker’s actions within the dialogue, Mitchell eliminates the need for “said” and packs the terse sentences with information.
Finally, the dash can be used to throw a spotlight on a phrase the author wants us to stop and think twice about:
"I prefer to think of the long-term future of AI as a kind of purgatory: a place where the flawed but good-hearted go to be purified—and tested—and come out better on the other side." (from "Mind vs. Machine" by Brian Christian, The Atlantic, March 2011)
By the way, a dash is NOT a hyphen, though it is typed as two hyphens, which most software changes to a real dash. Hyphens join words like "long-term"; dashes emphasize the break between them.
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"In Search of the Perfect Sentence"--what a great blog name!
ReplyDeleteLove these examples and your explanation of the difference between dashes and hyphens. :)
Great post! I've been thinking a lot about dashes and this was a really fun, helpful read. My last novel had no dashes because my newspaper reporter character didn't use them in her work, so I kept them out of the text entirely. My new manuscript is historical, which has allowed me to rediscover the joy of the dash. I loved how David Mitchell uses them in your examples--and now I need to go read some of his work!
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