mixing semicolon and em dash
I have a question about “;” and “—” as used in sentence structure. I prefer using — i.e. “He did not expect to meet anyone—the house had been empty for years—and was surprised to hear whistling from the upper floor.”
Now, as I wrote a line in my story, as sentence ran away from me and I ended up using a ; at the end, as well as the — and I got the feeling that maybe it had to be one or the other all the way through and not a mix. Anyway, the sentence (racial slur warning)
Rod had not let her buy the beer herself at first—not until father had gone down there and cleared up some misconceptions from that sneaky pool-digger—and hadn’t that been a fun day to be alive; now he just gave her sympathetic looks whenever she came to get beer for her father.
So, in such a sentence, is it right to use both the “—” and the “;”? I can always rebuild it, but it felt right to me somehow, even though I got uncertain about if it would sting in the eyes of others.
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It seems like a story written as a converstion, breathy and slightly disjointed, with double-nested interpolations. The long interpolation all the way from the first dash to the colon, rather undermines the contrast between "at first" and "now", so it is a bit hard to get back on track.
One could try a third dash instead of the semi-colon; or even insert "whereas" or "but"; not sure that makes it better though.
jayles the unwoven Nov-06-2015
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Not an answer, but a comment on the use of dashes in British English. As far as I know BrE doesn't talk much about em-dashes, for example you won't often see -- (substituting for an em-dash) from British contributors to forums etc. We simply use a dash, in writing the same length as a en-dash, (but on a computer just using a single hyphen), and we put spaces either side - like that, for example. And they don't seem to be used nearly as much as in American English.
From one website on British grammar:
'The double dash encloses supplementary information in the same way as round brackets –
"Alaska – purchased from Russia in 1867 and granted statehood in 1959 – comprises some 586,000 square miles and 624,000 people."
But brackets are preferred in formal scripts.'
This is from the Chicago Manual of Style Online:
"note that it is also the common British practice to use an en dash with a word space on either side where American publishers would use an em dash closed up to the surrounding words"
But I've noticed that the Economist has recently started using M-dashes without gaps. In the online version they are obviously M-dashes, and there's no real problem, but in the print edition they don't seem to be as wide. This is really confusing my students (and me, to be honest), who think they are hyphens, reading the two separate words as one hyphenated word. It turns out that Polish, like British English always uses gaps. I'm beginning to wonder about other European languages. WW will have to investigate!
Warsaw Will Nov-20-2015
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Another complex subject matter and regional differences may lead to confusion, misinterpretation, or misunderstandings. I found a pretty nice piece of instruction, again at GED Easy.com. It's on semicolon usage in American English, and may be of some help. Take a look here: http://gedeasy.com/ged-rla-prep-semicolon-usage/ Also in American English the double dash to provide additional information, in the same way we use brackets.
Kevin44 Jan-15-2016
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