This will be my last post for a while on issues to do with book formatting, layout, and style, but it seemed remiss of me not to write about another source of confusion. Dashes!
Dashes:
- can be used (alone or in pairs) to emphasise information. That could be to indicate sarcasm, act as an aside, create humour, give an additional piece of information, or a single dash can be used for drama – like this!
- can replace "to", as in Open Monday–Thursday 10.00–12.15; they can also be used between words of equal importance, such as patient–doctor confidentiality.
- can show that the end of a sentence that has been broken off by an interruption, or re-started following one.
- en-rules (en dashes), the width of a letter "n" –
[a shortcut to get one in Word is to press CTRL + the keypad "minus" key] - em-rules (em dashes), which are wider, like the width of a letter "m" —
PS these are the keyboard shortcuts in Windows:
[a shortcut to get one in Word is to press CTRL + Alt + the keypad "minus" key]
If you think of ellipses as a gentle pause or trail off, a dash is a more active break in the flow, or represents text being cut off. So a dash is a more aggressive form of an ellipsis.
I'm based in the UK so use the UK standard form of a space on each side of the en-rule except when it comes up against other punctuation (e.g. quotation marks, question mark).
- She ran – well, more of a drunken hobble – but the pram rolled faster.
- “When will we –” he began, before being beheaded.
- “I would like to –”
- “You never listen to me!” Bertie yelled.
- “– propose that we split up.” She folded her arms and, with satisfaction, watched Bertie's mouth fall slack.
- “I will but Karl's bo –” (spaced en-rule)
- “I will but Karl's bo–” (unspaced en-rule)
- “I will but Karl's bo—” (unspaced em-rule)
- "An em-rule closed up can be used in written dialogue to indicate an interruption, much like an ellipsis indicates trailing off:
- "Does the moon actually—?"
- "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist—"
- "An en-rule with a space before it can be used to indicate that a speech breaks off abruptly"
(it does not include that as a function of em-rules).
- “I will pay to –”
- and
- “It’s okay, the machine’s turned off, I won’t get electrocu–” Buzz etc.
"Intelligent" Line Breaks In Word
Lastly, a problem with dashes: if you use Microsoft Word then you may run into the issue that if you use a spaced en-rule (or even an unspaced em-rule) Word may still use it as a breaking point and puts the speech marks (or other punctuation) on the next line on their own, as here:
What a mess. It's because, although Word allows a non-breaking hyphen, it does not have a non-breaking en-rule or em-rule. Therefore you can't tell Word not to break the line at that point. If you encounter this problem then here are three possible solutions - let me know if any of them work for you. You could:
- Select the line of text. In the Font box, click the Advanced tab. Set the Condensed spacing to be 0.1 pt (or 0.1"). It will act like kerning to shrink enough space out of the line to fix the problem while still being readable. To use that setting repeatedly, you could create a custom "Condensed" character style.
- Try a hard space ("a space that thinks it is a letter"): Ctrl + Shift + Spacebar
- Make a non-breaking hyphen by holding down CTRL/Shift/Dash. Highlight it. In the Font dialogue click the little arrow on the bottom right. Make sure you are on the Advanced tab. Click 200%. Italicize it.
- analysis tools for writers
- use of ellipses
- tables of contents
- drop caps
- running heads
- images in books - quality versus compression
Where next?
Like my Facebook page /
Follow me on Twitter /
Subscribe to my newsletter
No comments:
Post a Comment