I wouldn’t nit it up on a forum post, but for formal writing, this seems like it should definitely be a comma instead of any sort of dash. It’s combining two independent clauses with a conjunction, “so,” and that’s almost universally done with a comma in English.
I’m fine with people having different styles, so long as they remain internally consistent.
People should use semicolons more often.
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Ah I did not, thought we were talking forum posting where I think basically anything goes. Yea I think en-dash is almost never right, usually coma or em dash or parentheses are better.
Makes me wonder, are other languages this nitty about punctuation?
I’d use em-dash before comma I think. Commas to me are like things that happen in a sequence. Dashes are like “it follows” - the way Bourdain used them and the way I just used it here. For when it follows, but a colon feels too heavy.
I’m gonna think out loud despite the fact that Google could correct my understanding:
I think this is a bit off of “proper” usage (whatever that means). Em dashes are usually like an aside, breaking the flow of a sentence to interject. Commas break up clauses or items in a list. I think the line between em dashes and parentheses is a bit blurry but I think the line between those and commas or en dashes is clearer. En dashes are like “I see 5 - 7 cases of cancer per year” and hyphens are for words you want to connect like “next-closest”
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Wat. Bourdain seems to use them in the customary sense: as an alternative to parentheses for a tangential point, or to unambiguously demarcate a clause that itself contains further commas. Commas are for lists, sure, but they have always served for conditionals and conjoining independent clauses with a conjunction:
If it’s sunny outside, then start your shopping at the farmer’s market. I went to the farmer’s market, and I bought berries there.
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I do try to throw semi-colons in every now and then. But I never know if I’m doing it right.
That’s fine for a comma.
But I don’t like a comma here: “We headed over to nearby Macaw Mountain - a sanctuary for scarlet macaws and other abandoned pet birds.”
I think em-dash is best if I’m not allowed to use the informal forum space-hyphen-space. Colon feels way too heavy.
I think this is actually a great place for a comma since it’s a clarifying informational clause. It’d be different if it was something like:
“We headed over to macaw mountain–a place I fucking hate–to eat pizza”
Yeah, that one is ambiguous, as it’s a tangent. Em dash, comma, or parenthetical all can work and none is especially definitive, although various style guides may recommend one over the others.
All my shit is tangents. I’m only talking about tangents.
To be fair, that’s probably the editor putting them in there rather than Tony himself.
Yeah you’re right that’s the classic use of em-dash. We need to find some singular uses of em-dash. Doubles are pretty easy.
We headed over to nearby Macaw Mountain–a sanctuary for scarlet macaws and other abandoned pet birds.
We headed over to nearby Macaw Mountain, a sanctuary for scarlet macaws and other abandoned pet birds.
Meh not sure if I like either of those over the other. I wish I could just use my forum dash - it’s how I think.
From Medium Raw:
I came to understand that she was from a very wealthy family—that she kept an apartment in New York.
This is basically exactly how I used space-hyphen-space. I’m going with em-dash to emulate Bourdain.
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As far as I see it, the second em dash in a sentence is only necessary if there is actually a continuation of the sentence. “We headed to macaw mountain–a place I fucking hate.” seems OK
The other issue is expository prose is just so damn hard for me. I wind up with too many commas and like to mix things up a little.
I can tell stories pretty well but I struggle with expository and I really struggle with descriptive. Everything I come up with feels like an 8th-grade creative writing project.
Although at 195k words to the book so far - I am slowly getting better at both.
I did just write a rant about The Crisis at Our Southern Border, and with 100k posts worth of practice arguing politics on message boards - that thing just flowed.
Likewise, I find commas tedious–which is why I end up using em-dashes in formal writing–because when you’re writing a lot of explanatory text it ends up just being a collection of commas. Maybe English has too many ways to separate related components of sentences: em-dash, comma, semicolon, colon. Is it the same in other languages, where grammar seems to be more flexible? I don’t know; I’ll probably never know.
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Trying to emulate Bourdain is a perfectly acceptable reason for non-standard use of an em-dash.
The two writers most often cited in discussion of em-dash use are James Joyce and Emily Dickinson.
Gonna go with the dark horse on this one and say it should be a colon.
I have no comments on the dash debate. This sums up my writing "process,’ for lack of a better term:
https://twitter.com/GeraintWorks/status/1383745091114717194?s=20
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