Dashes

We can use two dashes — but only in the middle of a sentence — in the same way that we use brackets.

Or we can use a single dash in the same way that we use a colon — to mark a break when we expect something to follow.

Do not mistake the dash (—) (also called the em dash) for the narrower hyphen (-) and use it with a single space on each side.

MS Word has settings to automatically convert a hyphen to a dash when the user presses the space bar after a word which follows the hyphen. To add a dash to your Word documents, hold down the ctrl key and press the minus on your number pad.

See also