As its name suggests, an em dash (—) is roughly the length of the letter M, while an en dash (–) more closely matches an N. A hyphen (-) is shorter still. That said, unless they’re all lined ...

May the em dash — the purveyor of impulse, a vessel for context and a gateway to digression — remain a lasting imprint of ...

It truly is a gift to writing — and you should absolutely use it. Unfortunately, the em-dash — and the en-dash (–) for that matter — is not popular enough to deserve its own place on the ...

But my point remains true: A hyphen is not an em dash. Nor is it an en dash. Each of these three punctuation marks has its own special job. Em dashes, often simply called dashes, are sentence ...

You can view her website or follow her on Twitter @carolyntrietsch. I’m ashamed to say that I did not know what an en dash or an em dash was until the last few years of my Ph.D. I had used em dashes ...

To insert an em dash, an en dash, or any special character in Google Docs in the Chrome desktop browser, choose Insert | Special Characters and search for the item to insert. The image shows a ...

By the way, we’re talking about em dashes, not en dashes, which are shorter, less widely used and have more in common with a hyphen than with a dash. En dashes are often seen in compounds like ...