#Dash symbol Pc

#Dash symbol Pc

On a PC with a number pad, you can type the minus key while holding down the control and alt keys. To make an em dash on a Mac computer, you type the hyphen key while holding down the shift and option keys. Book and magazine publishing usually omit the spaces-their dashes touch the word on either side. News publications usually put a space on either side of an em dash - making it sort of float.

A period or possibly a semicolon would be better. Personally, I consider it a mistake to use an em dash between complete clauses - this sentence is an example. You can even use em dashes for dialogue, datelines or taglines or to show that speech was cut off mid-sentence. They can also set off lists of items - names, places, things - mid-sentence or at the end. Or you can use em dashes to set off parenthetical thoughts - and who doesn’t love those? - in a sentence. Commas, parentheses and colons can usually get your point across in any spot where you might use a dash.īut if your sentence already has enough commas or if you want to create visual emphasis - like this - you can use em dashes to signal a change in sentence structure or thought. If you don’t want to use them, you don’t have to. Each of these three punctuation marks has its own special job.Įm dashes, often simply called dashes, are sentence punctuation - a way to connect ideas and phrases and clauses. But my point remains true: A hyphen is not an em dash. Then I googled it and learned that, apparently, I had made the term up. But it wasn’t until very recently someone asked me about the term “floating hyphen.” Is that a real thing? For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen with just a space on either side connecting two parts of a sentence – like this.