Some Advice for Using Dashes

Writers (professors, too) have mixed opinions about dashes. But if you don't over-use them, dashes are nice devices to sort of connect things together in a more or less informal way.

Rule 1: Use dashes in the same places you use semicolons and colons. (See semicolon rules and colon rules.

Rule 2: Use dashes in sentences that have semicolons and/or colons in them.

We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries- -each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise! [George Orwell]

Of course a GI watch was not the same as a civilian timepiece: the former usually had a hacking device--a means of stopping the mechanism completely and starting it again at the press of a button--the better to synchronize within a second or two; the latter was just a timepiece. [David S. Landes]
Until the producers decided what it was they wanted to say--bad Arabs, good Americans; good Arabs, bad Americans; oil reserves plentiful and cheap; oil reserves expensive and scarce--they might as well have been staring at nineteen hours of empty sky. [Lewis H. Lapham, "Notebook: Magic Lanterns," Harper's, May 1997, p. 11.]

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