The em dash is the sophisticate’s way to ramble aimlessly - where the novice just uses an ellipsis (.), the “writer” says, “Ah, I’ll use an em dash.” We used to write sentences, end them, and write other sentences - but now sometimes we just trail off - and other times we just string phrases together - and it’s all just - I don’t know - stream of consciousness, man. I blame the Internet - why not blame it for everything, I say. It makes your prose look as if it has the measles - and makes it read as if you’re on a train that stopping and starting with a jerk every few seconds. It’s a modern - as well as ancient - habit. People - and by people I mean writers of all kinds - just can’t finish a thought without interrupting themselves. What - in the name of all that is holy - accounts for the popularity of this mark? (If you listen closely, you can hear me mutter, “Why, I oughta -”)
Writers with sophisticated - and complex - thinking just seem to have a lot of connected things to say - the em dash allows them to connect those thoughts without working too hard on what the connection actually is. So many manuscripts I edit suffer from inflammation of the em dash - it’s rampant - as if these little buggers multiply like cockroaches. The shortcut takes some getting used to, but if you type em-dashes a lot you’ll get it down fairly quickly-plus, you won’t have to worry about OS X messing with your formatting ?.Unless - and I admit this is possible - you’re trying to annoy the reader, try not to fall in love - or even in like - with the em dash. With this setting off you need to use Option + Shift + - to type an em-dash, which is another built-in OS X keyboard shortcut.
The history behind straight and curly quotes is very similar to the em-dash/hyphen story. This setting also keeps OS X from turning straight quotes into curly quotes-aka turning "fancy" into “fancy”. Uncheck this box and OS X will no longer replace two hyphens with an em-dash. On OS X El Capitan there’s a “Use smart quotes and dashes” check box in the System Preferences > Keyboard > Text menu. OS X takes this a step further and implements this convention at an operating system level, which is great when you’re writing the next great novel, and not so great when you just want to type npm -help.
WHERE IS EM DASH ON KEYBOARD ON MAC SOFTWARE
Because of this inconvenience, word processing software has preserved the convention popularized in the typewriter days: automatically changing two hyphens into an em-dash. Nowadays we obviously have computers, but our keyboards still have no key to type an em-dash. In the day of the typewriter you actually couldn’t type an em-dash at all, so a convention was invented: using two hyphens in place of an em-dash. Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons-in each case to slightly different effect.”Įm-dashes are really commonly used in writing of all sorts, but they’ve always been a bit of a pain to type.
“The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark. I’ll let an actual grammar site give a good explanation of what em-dashes are: It’s subtle, but OS X is replacing nativescript -version with nativescript -version, or more specifically, it’s converting - (two hyphens) into - (an em-dash). Have you ever been typing in your email client, or some other OS X application, and had this happen: This is an article for all command-line users on OS X.