Punctuation can be like spices in food. They flavor and enhance the dish, but too much can overwhelm the blend and ruin the meal. The em dash has always been like sumac: a great, complex flavor in its ...

For centuries – or at least since the era of Virginia Woolf – the em dash has carved out a proud if unruly place in English prose. But now, for the crime of being favoured by writers for its many ...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen ...