A Brief History of the Em Dash

Love ‘em or hate ‘em—this punctuation mark is here to stay.

Photograph by Martha Swopes || Don’t these men look like they’re performing in em dash?

When you start paying attention to writing advice, you’ll find that there are lots of decrees surrounding the proper use of punctuation. I had a professor in graduate school who called for a ban on exclamation points; another, on excess italics. All in good faith—we could each stand to be more concise and self-suppressed. But one mark you’ll never be able to pry from my cold, dead hands is the almighty em dash. Because it’s more than a punctuation mark. It’s an ethos, a state, a heady rush of feeling that tolerates no space between thought to thought. It’s an energy! (Exclamation point and italics all at once, for you rule-breakers out there.)

My brilliant friend Lizzie recently forwarded this tweet that likened the em dash to a vibe, subject only to the dictates of one’s heart. I reshared the tweet, to lots of agreement among my writer- and reader-friends. Punctuation, after all, is a potent tool of communication, and one that has fallen by the wayside in the efficiency era of text-speak. Since I read that tweet, I’ve been thinking of the purpose of the versatile—sometimes ambiguous—em dash and why it strikes such a chord in our ethos.

The em dash is one of the most widely used marks nowadays, with uses ranging from the addition of suspense to the substitution of quotation marks. These varied uses are dependent almost entirely on context; where the dash appears in the sentence, who is using the dash, and what words surround it. A handy and inscrutable little tool. As someone with mild typographical synesthesia, I imagine the em dash in two ways. It’s either a nail set on its side, stiff and stalwart, or a spread wing, graceful and expansive. These disparate images tell me something about the flexibility of the em dash.

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A brief history of the em dash—

Em dashes are differentiated from other dashes by their width. The term “em” comes from the days of wood- and metal-set typography, delineating a space or mark that is roughly the size of the letter “m” in that particular typeface. (An en dash is a truncated version that set to the width of the letter “n”. I have little use for en dashes.) Dashes are called such because the marks on paper are often forceful and swift. The em dash, in particular, was used as a space-savings device, acting as a convenient bridge between sentiments. It was once the everyman of punctuation, serving many applications across fiction and journalism.

Though em dashes were popular in the early days of printing, they fell out of use with typewriters, which didn’t have a designated em dash key. A writer would have to use double hyphens (“--”) to signal an em dash, a practice that feels unsightly at best and mildly sacrilegious at worst. Nowadays, word processing programs and messaging apps will often automatically convert double hyphens to an em dash. Thankfully, the mark has been restored to our keyboards, so we needn’t suffer from a paucity of dashes.

Apparently, there are such things as two-em-dashes and three-em-dashes, in which multiple em dashes are smushed together. For what purpose? I truly cannot tell you. I haven’t seen either in the wild, but they might finally push a furrow in my dash-approbative brow.

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As for the em dash’s modern use—

The em dash isn’t without detractors. Editors will rightfully begin to notice if you use too many. An excess can make you look unhinged or, at least, as breathless as an Emily Dickinson poem.* And it’s true that an em dash can become a crutch, releasing the writer of the responsibility for clear and ordered thought. But that can be said of any lazily used communication device.

What we know for certain is that punctuation, like people, is ever-evolving. For a time, em dashes were eschewed as the mark of punctuational profligacy. Now, the tide seems to have turned for my battered little friend. In my own writing, I find that a well-placed em dash can revive a turn of phrase and provide access to the writer’s interiority. Here, the em dash proclaims, is the moment when the soul pauses, when the mind trips over itself. The em dash is humanity, scattered and unfettered.

In moments of tension, my characters sometimes end their statements with an em dash, which denotes an abrupt stop. At the end of the day— For me, this device often signals that there’s a world underneath the silence, one in which emotions riot. And like their author, my characters’ thoughts often overlap, fighting for dominance. The em dash can signal this quick hopscotch from thought to thought. This might be true—or maybe it’s more like this. The em dash complicates the experience of interiority on the page like no other punctuation mark.

In my first corporate job, one of my editors insisted on adding a space before and after my em dashes, creating a duet of unfilled breaths that bothered me to no end. Even though many modern publications disagree, I hold that there should be no space before or after an em dash. This choice is deliberate, historical. So, hunched in my cramped cubicle, I went back into my red-lined doc and removed each space again in an act of petty rebellion. (I’ve since let go of this rigidity, especially in casual correspondence.) In my brief time as a typographer, I was a hawk about the use of a hyphen versus an en dash versus an em dash. Each are distinct in usage and character. Conflating them could change the meaning of a sentence entirely. Punctuation is the joinery of a piece of writing, no matter how brief, and it behooves us to honor it where we can.

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Of course, once I started paying attention to em dashes, I noticed them in everything I read. It’s the frequency illusion. Are em dashes really taking over or am I just more receptive to them? Both, probably. (I certainly became more aware of em dashes when writing this post!)

I wonder if there’s a surge of em dashes in the zeitgeist because it reflects the urgency we feel in public discourse. The need to be heard amid screaming headlines and run-on commentary. Many of us feel interrupted and disenfranchised in our daily lives, so it makes sense that the em dash presents an apt representation of this disconnect.

Or perhaps an em dash is the antidote to AI corporate-speak. It’s a flush of enthusiasm and uncertainty in places where we could stand to have a little less efficiency. The em dash offers a breakage of thought that fractures possibilities of expression. Our sentences become kaleidoscopic, rather than linear. And maybe that’s just what we need in this post-narrative reality.

For my part, I enjoy those who can employ an em dash to great effect. They’re my people. And the detractors, well—

Ultimately, em dashes remind us that we are not sets of distilled bullet points but unfurling landscapes of dots and dashes that, even after five millennia of written words, can still feel new. The em dash makes us believe that our human consciousnesses—messy, beautiful, sublime—remain ​​sui generis and, mercifully, irreplaceable.

* In Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour, one of the characters writes Dickinsonian emails in which em dashes precede each of her line breaks. About Dickinson’s em dashes, critics opine aplenty. One wrote that the dashes are “graphic representation[s] in the poem of the presence of the creative impulse, of the spontaneity of the emotional force that went into the composition.” That feels like the truest explanation of this inscrutable mark.