“You can pry Shift+Alt-Hyphen from my cold, dead hands!” That was the thought going through my mind when this article entered my flow of information. I've long had a bit of an infatuation with the EM dash. And so, firm in my convictions, I read the article confident in an unwavering stance.
Dang … Noreen Malone argues her point well. I know that I've grown too fond of this nice, long dash, giving it preference over the period, comma and semi-colon. I mean, semicolons are not even nice to look at. Okay, odd fetishes aside, this article convinced me that I've been using the dash as a crutch and that interrupting my own thoughts is probably a sign of our over-stimulated culture.
So back to Strunk and White I go, to improve my sentence construction. And don't look now — two full paragraphs with no dash. Huzzah!
[ via Shawn Blanc ]
