For essays, dissertations, and other formal writing, use brackets and colons to separate information from the main text. Therefore, you should avoid using em dashes this way in academic writing. When you use em dashes instead of parentheses (or brackets) like this, your writing is usually more dramatic. I named my pets-Loki, Thor, and Wanda-after my favorite Marvel characters. When you’re writing for an American audience, you can use em dashes as an alternative to parentheses: You can use one when somebody suddenly stops talking like this:Īn em dash can also be used to show that one speaker is talking over another: “Hey Jude” is over seven minutes long – 40% of it is “na na na!”Įm dashes are used in all English dialects to indicate interrupted speech. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter! Moreover, UK English allows for a spaced en dash to be used like a colon to introduce new information: The most popular Beatles song – “Hey Jude” – was in the charts for 19 weeks. If you’re writing for UK readers, you can also use pairs of spaced en dashes instead of parentheses: In all of these uses, the en dash is used without spaces. Mark Knopfler sang about the Mason–Dixon line.Įn dashes can also be used in place of a hyphen when a prefix comes before a compound noun or adjective: The Keith Urban Tour, July 8th–December 17th 2022įeelings run high in the Marvel–DC debate. The en dash is used in all English dialects in the following four ways: We’ve written before about en dashes and em dashes, but today’s post is about how these punctuation marks are used differently in US and UK English. En Dashes and Em Dashes in US and UK EnglishĮven though the difference between the en dash and the em dash might be only a millimeter, confusing them in your writing can be a big problem.
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