LOL, we’ve been talking about em-dashes for a long time; I posted this sometime in December 2019. 
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Em dashes are hideous to look at. Good on you.
This is no doubt rehashing a years-old discussion, but I think you just need to adjust your feelings towards commas. A comma is 100% fine in that sentence imo.
The problem is that what you typed isn’t a “single dash”, it’s a hyphen. Hyphens are used to join words together (e.g., “self-awareness”), but dashes are separators.
It’s obviously fine for a message board or email, but you can’t get away with this in a real book unless you’re really trying to be an iconoclast and a punctuation pioneer.
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Properly used em-dashes are glorious! They’re the Rambrandts, the Picassos, the Pollocks of punctuation all rolled into one.
I like those artists - the first two especially - but hate how the length of an em dash dominates the text. I also loathe the lack of space between the words and the dash. I do agree about commas though, and am pretty sure that many highly regarded authors I’ve read would prefer commas there.
I use em dashes all the time when writing treatment notes–because I can.
I like those artists - the first two especially - but hate how the length of an em dash dominates the text.
I like those artists—the first two especially—but hate how the length of an em dash dominates the text.
I can see where you’re coming from but I think the length and lack of space helps the visual flow.
Maybe part of the problem is that with so much reading being done on screens now, it just looks a bit different than real typography on a printed page. And people typing on the internet rarely use em-dashes even when they should, so we’ve all just gotten less used to seeing them in general.
I use dashes a lot, but I (and I think other people) use them kind of as an emphasized comma. So, , from now on, , I think I’ll go with the double-comma when trying to do that.
eta: Didn’t want the space between commas, but the software wouldn’t let me do it without a space.
eta: Maybe like this,, ?
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yall
punctuation is made up, you can use whatever you want, nobody cares
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Yes but languages evolve. If the space hyphen space becomes ubiquitous in informal writing, it could make its way into formal writing eventually.
There’s a very specific time when I use it - when I want to indicate some kind of “it follows that” relationship. IE - not just a list of thoughts but one thought leading into another. Commas often feel like a list of peers, and sometimes I want to disambiguate that this isn’t just a sequential relationship. But colon and em dash feels too strong, even for formal writing.
But if I think about it or try to force it then I lose my instinct of when to use it which has been built up over 100k forum posts. So it’s hard to explain and use right, as in the example above which is close but maybe not my usual usage.
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People need to use more semicolons.
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I read a take that semi-colons confuse the reader since they see them so rarely; and that feels right.
fyp
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I also use and way too much. I have to constantly fight it. Apparently I think in terms of endless and statements.
For your single dashes, do you prefer to use a hyphen or an en dash?
Whatever comes out when I type -
Like Butterscotch Horseman!
There’s a doctor here you can talk to about that.
All this grammar talk has me pining for some more discussion about maternity ward photos.
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