But our New York team don’t use it because they prefer the elegance of the en dash. They’re sometimes used instead of en dashes in the US to separate out a phrase (like this: ‘There was no way to make the words better-or was there?’). There are different keystrokes for writing an em dash based on the program and keyboard. But sometimes you might need to put one in manually.Įm dashes aren’t used so much in the UK these days. The em dash, or long dash, is the only punctuation mark on a keyboard that doesnt have its own key. If you type in a hyphen to separate out a phrase within a sentence, Word will generally autocorrect it to an en dash. And for those ranges, don’t forget to take the spaces out from either side of the dash. You can also use a dash on its own to mark a break in a sentence – try it instead of a semicolon.Īlways use an en dash, not a hyphen, in a range like 30–40 (only use dashes if you’re doing a range of figures – use ‘to’ for things like ‘Monday to Friday’). Use an en dash to separate out a phrase within a sentence – perhaps to break up the text, or add emphasis – instead of commas or brackets. So you might say ‘the new car runs on diesel – that classic fuel – and will soon run electrically.’ Or you could say ‘we know you like fresh veg – so we started a garden.’ So we use hyphens to make compound adjectives, things like ‘the wind-powered turbine’.īut you use a dash to make an aside (a parenthetical, in grammar jargon) or a connected sentence. But here’s the big idea: hyphens join up words, while dashes separate sentences or clauses. There is a lot of commentary on which to use, and when. Here’s what they look like, from shortest to longest: Below are two easy ways you can type the em dash in word using a keyboard shortcut. So, my first option will show you how to insert this sign in Word using a keyboard shortcut. The em dash gets its name from being the width of, you guessed it, an ‘m’. OPTION 1: Em dash shortcut I love shortcuts for the time it saves. An en dash gets its name from being the width of an ‘n’ (at least, historically). A hyphen (which we all know), an en dash and an em dash. There are three different ‘weights’, or sizes, of a dash.
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