I wish I could easily type a proper em dash in my blog entries.
I use em dashes all the time — they’re great for breaking up sentences (like this one) — but they don’t come out properly when I type them in WordPress (see?).
Whenever I want to use an em dash, I habitually type [space][hyphen][hyphen][space]. For example: “I like spaghetti[space][hyphen][hyphen][space]well, usually…” The spaces are improper. I don’t know where I got that bad habit.
But WordPress autocorrects two hyphens to something that looks closer to an en dash instead of an em dash. So if I type [space][hyphen][hyphen][space] in WordPress — like here — it doesn’t look right. Imagine how bad it looks without the spaces–such as here–you see? The only way to create an em dash in WordPress is to type three consecutive hyphens—like so. I still habitually type two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence; now I’m supposed to train myself to type three hyphens when writing an em dash in a blog entry, while remembering to use only two hyphens for everything else I write? And if I ever switched to another blog service, I’d have to change all the triple dashes after importing all my old entries.
So I apologize to any typography mavens. Sparky, for instance. Sparky, I’ve always remembered that you wrote this more than three years ago.
I don’t know what to do except continue my old habits. Sorry, everyone.
See? Movable Type does it right. Shoulda stuck it out. (Still, you can do a global search and replace with most CMS.)
I will never be quite sober enough (metaphorically, or otherwise) to use the en dash outside the most formal of contexts. That’s a character that should probably be allowed to wither on the vine; it would not exactly be disastrous if the hyphen were to assume its function.
Typography geeks, to Tin Man’s aid!
A publishing-platform neutral approach is to use the actual HTML entity code for em-dash: —, which renders as —.
Mike, I remember seeing a summary of en-dash usage rules at A List Apart. There’s an even better article at Wikipedia. Of course, one could argue that the existence of rules for a little-understood–little-used punctuation mark indicate its need to disappear. But that’s always been the way of good typography. What’s needed to make type look good isn’t always apparent.
(There was an en-dash in the previous paragraph, used successfully. :))
Tim, the only problem with the HTML code is that I don’t want to type it every time I want to use an em dash. If there’s a WP plugin that automatically converts it to HTML code, that might work. Maybe I’ll look for one.
I too am a great fan of the mdash — when properly executed. Here is the code “$#151” (use the info without the “”) and in a html document, it’ll look like this — a perfectly executed mdash.
I just read the link that says this code is wrong — but it doesn’t look wrong to me.
It doesn’t look like a dash to me. It just looks like the characters you typed.