Em dash
By no means do I consider myself an expert on grammar. In fact, if you look at any of my post, you would be surprised that I am a newspaper copy editor. I consider myself more of a designer and butcher than a copy editor, but nevertheless that’s no excuse to be as bad as I am. However, this post is not about my skills.
People magazine has a great love for the em dash. In today’s top headlines, two out of the five have a form of punctuation I detest: the em dash. Here’s a screenshot of the magazine’s usage as displayed by iGoogle:
In these two examples, the em dash is used to create drama where it is not needed. Is is really shocking that Paris Hilton and Ryan Seacrest are doing a TV show together? The em dash makes it seem that way. After all, E! and Fox have given these two millions of dollars to dumb down America. Why is this so much of a surprise.
According to The Blue Book, this is the proper use of an em dash:
Use an em dash sparingly in formal writing. Don’t use it just because you are uncertain about correct punctuation. In informal writing, em dashes may replace commas, semicolons, colons, and parentheses to indicate added emphasis, an interruption, or an abrupt change of thought.
In these headlines, there’s no change of thought, a break or drama. Instead, it’s created to catch someone’s attention needlessly — just like it did to me, but not in the way it was intended to be.
In a way, I could just be writing this to gain my own attention and write a few em dash headlines of my own:*
Lindsay Lohan is in love — with a sandwich
Obama, Biden choose — ties for campaign appearances
*By no means are these headlines real.
permalink | | observations | 09/12/2008
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