Punctuation conquers all, part three

My high school boyfriend’s name was Mark. (No, really. That’s not a punctuation joke.) We met junior year in Honors English class. (Again, not a joke).)

Mark, with his wavy brown hair and his zippy little car, with his music I’d never heard before and his jokes that made me snort-laugh behind my hand while Ms. Whatshername droned on about research citations—Mark interrupted my plans and my feelings and all my ideas. He was a joy and a surprise.

Mark was an em dash kind of love. This one’s for him.

Please enjoy part three:

May your love be an em dash

Let’s be clear on what an em dash is: a punctuation mark about the width of a letter M (presumably measured in Blackletter or some other early ancestral typeface). It’s a horizontal line between words, a member of the dash family, though not to be confused with the hyphen or en dash. They have their jobs, and important ones at that. Em dashes serve a different purpose.

The em dash interrupts to add value.

Like commas and parentheses, em dashes set off extra information, such as examples, explanatory or descriptive phrases, or supplemental facts. . . Em dashes are used in place of commas or parentheses to emphasize or draw attention to parenthetical or amplifying material.                                 

-Merriam-Webster.com

 A thought framed by em dashes in the middle of a sentence can be quiet, like an aside to an audience, or a gathering of the speaker’s thoughts. Or it might be bold—a revelation. Conversationally, we might call this type of interjection a tangent, and aren’t genuine conversations all the richer for those freely wandering thoughts? They’re interruptions that add detail and fulness and magnify possibilities.

“He’s talking about his favorite book—which she has never heard of, and she reads everything, but not much science fiction, so that might explain it—and she’s lost the thread of the conversation because his hand is so close to hers.”

I was completing homework assignments and attending musical theater rehearsals when the boy from English class interrupted my life—with both quiet asides and bold revelations—and added something more. Love is often like an em dash in that way: an unexpected interruption, drawing attention to supplemental facts and amplifying material that opens questions and enriches our lives.

The em dash indicates a new direction.

An em dash can break sentence structure or create an abrupt shift.

“They were complete opposites—yet somehow they belonged together.”

I could have continued that sentence in the vein of the first clause: “They were complete opposites: he was a punk, she did ballet.”

But with an em dash we shift paths and conclude the sentence with a thought in the more interesting, paradoxical direction.

An em dash can also introduce a clause that explains or expands upon something that precedes it, like a summary statement that follows a list.

“School, choir practice, homework, church, repeat—her life was routine and predictable before the boy in English class invited her to a party.”

Like love, the em dash facilitates surprising twists and turns.

An em dash expands a sentence and says: But wait—there’s more.

Like the semicolon, the em dash is technically unnecessary in our lexicon. It does jobs that semicolons, commas, or parentheses can do—fleshing out thoughts or extending sentences with one more clause—but it does them with more punch in the gut.

“Riding in his car, windows down, his hand on hers, singing along to the alt-rock radio station she’d never given a chance—suddenly she realized she didn’t want the summer to end.”

The em dash opens dazzling possibilities for adding to the fullness of a sentence, whether by inserting new and exciting information, helping the reader understand what came before, or by adding a plot-twist ending.

“She felt happy with him—a wild joy full of possibility—the kind of freedom she’d been conditioned to fear—and that’s why, in the end—senior year and the expectations of others looming on the horizon—she shut him out. She ran away.”

An em dash kind of love is unanticipated and exhilarating. It’s enriching and leaves you, changed, on a different path than where you began. And no matter how much you’d like to rewrite the ending, with an em dash you can’t go back.

May we all have an exhilarating, em dash kind of love, at least once in our lives.