Item — HN Reader

This guide and most guides like it tend to miss the most important and powerful use of the em-dash and make it out like you can use it for anything but really they are just missing the wonderful simplicity of the em-dash and how versatile that simplicity is. The em-dash raises and lowers the narrative voice. In fiction this provides a way to provide insight into the narrator; an em-dash tells us we are switching from the story the narrator is telling us to the thoughts of the narrator, a second em-dash or a period lowers the voice back down to the story the narrator is conveying. This is the sense of dialog being introduced with em-dashes instead of being quoted, a new line starting with an em-dash lowers the narrative voice, narrator hands story off to character.

The simplified rules for the em-dash are pretty much intuited and prescribed versions of this which gut the effectiveness of em-dash. In general use an em-dash should be used to denote thoughts without having too restructure/delete what you just wrote to accommodate that thought.

Edit: I oversimplified. Consistency is what is important, using an em-dash like a comma that isn't a comma leads to ambiguity when you also use commas. A writer who avoids semicolons and quotes all dialog can use an em-dash very differently than raising the voice, but they can also use a semi-colon very differently than its standard accepted role, that is what these simple guides miss, the consistency of usage, they just list all of the various ways you could use any given mark and people start using an em-dash to "fix" their long run-on sentence with all of its commas.

The closest thing we have to standard use allows for wonderfully complex sentences which can convey great meaning but consistent and well defined use is most important.

comma - connects independent and dependent clauses

em-dash - raises and lowers the voice

semicolon - connects independent clauses in a more direct way than the paragraph

colon - elaborates an idea

parenthesis - an aside, stated instead of thought

period - end of thought

Question mark and exclamation points do not need to be at the end of a sentence, they can double as comma, semicolon, or colon.

I seem to be missing a nuance of HN's line breaks and formatting.

5 comments

Reasonable choices. And a good description of a specific use for the em dash. But I think it’s a poor mind that can only conceive of a single use for a punctuation mark.

We could also use em dashes to signal excitedly running from one thought to the next—as if we’re just riffing on an idea—too fast to be interrupted—wouldn’t that be amazing?

Or we can use the em dash to slow us down—to pause and reflect on what we just said.

Or in dialog:

“Perhaps we can use it to signal an unexpected inter—“

“-rogation?”

“No, an interruption.”

“Yes, that would make more sense.”

“Oh! I just thought of something—we could also use it to indicate stunned silence.”

“—“

“Exactly.”

It is easy to conceive of uses, having a consistent style which conveys what you want to most any reader is another thing. If you had wrote all those examples without using the text to explain them the reader would have to stop and think about what you are doing and that is not a good thing.

Sure, but any given work could introduce such a use within the first few pages and the reader would be accustomed to it pretty quickly.

Too quote myself "consistent and well defined use is most important," and I have repeated this sentiment in most if not every post I have made in this thread. My point to the previous comment was that if you were not consistent it would not make sense, if his examples did not explain themselves than they would leave the reader stopping to figure out what is going on at each punctuation mark. You can break your own conventions within a work but those conventions need to be well established before you do so and you need a good reason to do so, breaking your own conventions because relying on the punctuation is easier than relying on the language or on whim is a terrible idea.

I've never heard that perspective before about raising the voice, but I really like it.

What's even more interesting to me is that this contrasts with a parenthetical which I now realize lowers the voice when we read it aloud.

Did you discover that difference on your own or did you read it somewhere? Just curious.

I realized it on my own in an intuitive sense, my writing before I properly learned it shows this use but eventually I read some things on punctuation and fixed my naive use of the em-dash and other punctuation marks. I think "raising the voice" might be the old fashioned term but I can not remember the more current term or even if there is one, put some time last night into trying to find it but search engines are nearly useless and return page after page of sites conflating voice and tone or prescription punctuation guides which just list uses with no care about consistency in style.

I realized it on my own in an intuitive sense - my writing before I properly learned it shows this use but eventually I read some things on punctuation and fixed my naive use of the em-dash and other punctuation marks. I think "raising the voice" might be the old fashioned term but I can not remember the more current term or even if there is one - put some time last night into trying to find it but search engines are nearly useless and return page after page of sites conflating voice and tone, or prescription punctuation guides which just list uses with no care about consistency in style.

This is how I read them.

My mental model is that an em-dash is a parentheses that author was too excited to slow down and make vertical.

Do you have a reference for this? Never heard that particular framing about the narrative voice before. You call it a versatile simplicity, but to me it sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.

Search engines seem to really fail here, they are just giving me more guides like the one here, I can not get them to give me anything about narrative voice beyond conflations of narrative voice and tone. You can see this use in a great deal of literature which uses the em-dash to introduce dialog in place of quotes, I believe Becket would apply but it has been years since I have read him so can not say for certain. Most of the authors known for their long complex sentences follow the conventions I outlined in my edit even if they do not use the em-dash for dialog.

>sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.

Write a single sentence which clearly and concisely includes exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question, self rebuttal and conclusion without following the "standard" I included in my edit. This is what allows writers like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences and by complex I am referring too meaning as much as structure, we can have great meaning with simple structures but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that. Sure that challenge can be executed as a paragraph but then it ceases being a single thought, it is a collection of thoughts and that is a very different thing.

If you'll indulge me, I actually think your final paragraph could be copyedited to illustrate all of your suggested 'standard' rules — though in your own rendering you only used commas and periods.

> Write a single sentence, which clearly and concisely includes exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question, self rebuttal and conclusion, without following the "standard" I included in my edit: This is what allows writers (like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc) to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences (and by complex I am referring to meaning as much as structure); we can have great meaning with simple structures, but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that—sure, that challenge can be executed as a paragraph, but then it ceases being a single thought; it is a collection of thoughts, and that is a very different thing.

I tried to stick to your 'standard', though you might disagree on some of my choices. I would say I found it a little constraining. Here's an alternative edit that doesn't follow your rules but – I find – creates a more fluid reading of your original words:

> Write a single sentence, which clearly and concisely includes: exposition; thought; aside; rhetorical question; self rebuttal; and conclusion – without following the "standard" I included in my edit. This is what allows writers like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc, to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences—and by complex I am referring to meaning, as much as structure. We can have great meaning with simple structures – but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that. Sure, that challenge can be executed as a paragraph; but then it ceases being a single thought—it is a collection of thoughts, and that is a very different thing.

All of which I hope goes to show that these choices are a matter of taste, not absolute rules

That paragraph of mine and most of my posts could stand some editing, I am terrible at editing on a screen and my casual use tends to be comma heavy. I think your edits wonderfully highlight an issue I believe I brought up in one of my posts in this thread, trying to "fix" things by changing the punctuation rarely works and restructuring the sentence(s) is almost always a better path.

>All of which I hope goes to show that these choices are a matter of taste, not absolute rules

Throughout this exchange I have avoided calling these rules and used convention instead, and that is what punctuation use is. Conventions are easy to break but you should have a good reason to do so if you want something to be readable and you must be consistent in your choices. I have tried to emphasize this throughout and I have repeated it many times, consistency of use is what really matters, punctuation marks are pretty much sign posts for the reader and as long as they remain consistent in their use and are well formed than most readers will have no issues figuring out any use.

Imagine if a town decided one day that they could save some money on removing a no longer needed stop sign by simply agreeing that it is not a stop sign, it is a small town and they can just pass the word that the stop sign on third is now a 30mph sign. This works quite well and save some money so now the town continues with this and starts changing the meaning of other signs. It is not difficult to see why this would be troublesome, eventually people will get confused and no one from out of town will have a clue. Thankfully our governments are consistent with their signs and a stop sign is a stop sign.

I gave I look through my books and English is wonderfully ambivalent when it comes to punctuation outside of prescriptive grammars. The descriptive grammars largely (if not completely) ignore punctuation and focus on spoken language, even the Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language reduces punctuation "rules" to a single page and reduces hyphen/en/em-dash to a typographical convention and does not say much more than the dash is often used in informal writing to replace other punctuation marks. All we really have here is convention and consistency, can you meet the challenge I outlined without following the conventions I laid out? It can be done but it will be considerably more verbose than it would be following those conventions which is not a bad thing. Authors like McCarthy, Krasznahorkai, Ellman, Bernhard have all built their style around breaking those conventions (yes, two are translations when it comes to English but they break the conventions in their own languages as well.) Even Joyce breaks the convention and he does it within single works, switches between adherence and breaking, but not many have pulled that off in the way he did.

It is a really complex thing and part of what makes English literature what it is. We have conventions which have evolved over time when it comes to punctuation and we have prescription, but we don't really have rules unless you are writing tech documents or journal submissions. It comes down to having a clear and consistent use more than anything else and using every punctuation mark for any accepted use based on whim is not clear or consistent.

I think I'd like to fork the language and write one with sane guidelines.

The problem is that the real world, human thoughts and other things that language needs to try to express are not "sane." So if we are to have a common basis for communication, the guidelines will tend to get "insane."