Grammar and the Em Dash

Grammar has always fascinated me. In 7^th grade when we starting diagramming sentences I loved it. Others cringed but I guess the visual part of me loved breaking down sentences that way. I taught third grade for years and would teach them “the rules” for grammar but often said the rules change in language. Spellings of words change, meanings change and the use of punctuation changes. I was discussing this with them because at the time there was a push to get rid of the last comma in a series. I happen to like that but other teachers wanted to keep it. The same is true of periods after abbreviations. They were a given for years and now not so much. This may have happened in the US with the UPS two letter state abbreviations that do not use periods. I don’t know about you, but I am all for cutting out things that are not needed. Think of how much cartridge ink we’d save. There’s a problem for you math wizards.

Change though is often hard, especially for students. They go to a new teacher and they have a different standard. That is why schools usually have their own style manuals that all disciplines use for written work. I was a psych major in college and we used APA(American Psychological Association) manual which is primarily used for the social sciences but when I took education courses in graduate school we used the MLA(Modern Language Association) style which is usually used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities .

With more people writing publicly, whether on Facebook, Twitter or blogs we have seen some changes in punctuation use. For instance, you may not be aware but there is a trend, particularly in web writing to use more em dashes.

For those of you who are uncertain, The Grammar Book explains that there are several kinds of dashes.

• An en dash –, which is about the width of an n, is used primarily for periods of time, such as 2009-2011.

• An em dash —, which is about the width of an m, is to be used sparingly in formal writing. In informal writing, em dashes may replace commas, semicolons, colons, and parentheses to indicate added emphasis, an interruption, or an abrupt change of thought.

Recently Slate magazine had an article, The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash subtitled Modern prose doesn’t need any more interruptions—seriously, that addressed this change. In it author Noreen Malone stated that the em dash is being used more and more and “the problem with the dash–as you may have noticed!–is that is discourages truly efficient writing. It also–and this might be its worse sin–disrupts the flow of a sentence.” In the article, she referenced Strunk and White, the standard for all things grammar, and the delightful book Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Truss, both of which discourage the use of the em dash.

Malone said that the use of the em dash is not new as Emily Dickinson used it, though unconventionally.  But why is it so prevalent today? She thinks that it is a sign of poor style and that guidelines are just considered suggestions today so “that makes the dash so popular in our post-sentence-diagramming era”.  So, we are lazy and have no clear standard. Wow. That says a lot about our culture today, doesn’t it? I also wonder if part of the problem may be that we no longer–for the most part–teach sentence diagramming.

What do you think about the changes in grammar that have occurred in your lifetime?