7.5 Dashes

Unlike semi-colons and colons, dashes are over-used. They are often used by writers who

are unsure which punctuation mark to choose. Dashes should NOT be used instead of

brackets, parenthetical commas, semi-colons, full stops, or colons before lists and

quotations.

Avoid all of the following constructions:

X Even the dual-earner family — a very common case in Britain — finds it increasingly difficult to purchase a home in many parts of the country.

X Elizabeth makes her feelings obvious — she despises Mr Collins.

X Elizabeth feels only one emotion for Mr Collins — contempt.

All of these can be rewritten using more appropriate punctuation. However, dashes do have their place, whatever some may say. When you use one make sure you type a long dash (—) not a short hyphen (-). Press Ctrl, Alt and the hyphen key at the top right of your keyboard. Dashes are useful where the sense of the sentence is interrupted in some way, or where a long qualification or description has led away from the main point of the sentence.

The dash provides a breathing space in which the sentence can reorganise itself:

 Asdiwal is young, enthusiastic, intelligent, successful, courageous to the point of foolhardiness — the classic tragic hero.

The final phrase does not fit easily into the syntax of the sentence, but it is obviously referring to the subject of the sentence, Asdiwal. If you were to put a comma after ‘foolhardiness’, the final phrase would get lost in the list of adjectives. You could create a new sentence: ‘He is a classic tragic hero.’ However, this lacks the immediacy and movement of the version above. A dash seems justified in this case.

Here is another one:

 Hamlet’s indecisiveness, his arrogance, his suspicion of others, his passionate, brooding, introspective nature — these all contribute to his downfall.

In both these sentences you could quite correctly substitute a colon. However, the effect of a colon is to lead the reader forward into the following section. A dash is more like a bucket of

cold water flung in the reader’s face, jolting them back to the starting point of the sentence. Colons point forward, and dashes point backward. Nobody wants this experience too often,

so, once more, use with extreme caution. If you can replace a dash with another punctuation mark, you probably should.

7.6 Quotation marks

In British usage, speech and quotations are signalled by single quotation marks:

 O’Brien asked her respondents to identify their social class and got, ‘What do you mean by class?’

Quotations and speech within quotations are signalled by double quotation marks:

 ’When Obrien’s respondent said, “I am middle class”, she did so without utilising a sociologists’ definition of class status.

You will see this done the other way around, with double quote marks on the outside and single quotes within. This will probably be in books or journals published in the US, where the system is reversed. Please use the British system. For more on quotations, see Section C.