Dashes, Quotes, Ellipses: Impressing a Copyeditor

No, really! I’m sure I’m up there, with people like “your dad” and “janitor at your local Trader Joe’s.” It’s important to impress the important people in your life.

Okay, fine—it’s probably a sorry sight to see a twenty-something dude with a weird name hunched over a table obsessing over the difference between an “en dash” and an “em dash.” (Trust me: I’m great at parties, which I definitely go to.)

But look, I’m sick and tired… of people using the wrong kinds of dashes. Of people being straight… instead of curly with their quotes. Of people stringing me along… with a series of three periods instead of a proper ellipsis character. (Is this how you do clickbait?)

So humor me, and maybe—just maybe—you’ll wow everyone around you with your attention to detail and your ability to sell more than 250 copies of your book.

Dashes

Hyphens

Use a hyphen (-) in the following cases:

  • Forming compound terms: “self-respect,” “window-shopping,” “all-encompassing,” etc.
  • yeah that’s it lol

Well, okay—you’d also use a hyphen to split apart a word in case it doesn’t fit on one line. But most word processors do that automatically for you, and the hyphen isn’t part of the actual word, so it doesn’t count.

But everything else that you think you’d use a hyphen for? Nope—not the hyphen’s job. And just like that, you’ve become better than 90 percent of everyone I’ve ever met.

En dashes

Use an en dash (–) in the following cases:

  • Forming a range of numbers: “18–21,” “2022–2023,” “3–5 p.m.”
  • Writing a score: “The Miami Heat are currently down 3–1 in the NBA Finals”
  • Indicating conflict, connection, or direction: “liberal–conservative debate,” “New York–London flight,” “east–west trip”
  • Forming a compound adjective where one of the terms has a space: “post–New Deal era” (tenuous)

Wow, that’s a lot of things! The biggest things to remember with the en dash are that it’s slightly longer than the hyphen and that it’s used with numbers.

I’m willing to let slide the other times you’re supposed to use the en dash, because those are a bit trickier; I’ll just fix those for you (and hopefully you’ll pay me for that).

Em dashes

Use an em dash (—) in the following cases:

  • Replacing one comma: “Mr. Bob lunched on pickles—a hideous choice”
  • Replacing two commas or a pair of parentheses: “Mr. Bob—a hideous sort of man—lunched on pickles”
  • Replacing a colon: “Mr. Bob loved two things and two things only—pickles and despair”

Em dashes are longer than hyphens and en dashes, and they emphasize whatever’s after or between them. This makes them, in some sense, the most useless punctuation mark in the English language: you could remove them and we’d survive, scraping by with commas, colons, and parentheses.

We write, however, not only to survive but to live—in that sense, em dashes are the most essential mark in English, because their sole purpose is to add drama. And that’s life!

But, like life, em dashes are easy to screw up—maybe the easiest to screw up out of all the other punctuation marks out there. Here are the most common ways I see people trying (and failing) to write the em dash:

  • A hyphen: “Mr. Bob lunched on pickles-a hideous choice”
  • A hyphen with spaces around it: “Mr. Bob lunched on pickles - a hideous choice”
  • Two hyphens: “Mr. Bob lunched on pickles--a hideous choice”
  • An en dash: “Mr. Bob lunched on pickles–a hideous choice”

Hideous. If this is you (and statistically, it is), I judge you. Please stop.

If you want to learn more about dashes (or any punctuation mark), I recommend The Punctuation Guide.

Curly quotes

Can you figure out the difference between these two sentences? It’s very subtle, so take your time:

  • “I know what I’m doing.”
  • "I don’t know what I'm doing."

Honestly, that second sentence is me right now as I chug on a Peach Revival Yerb and cram writing three blog posts, one podcast, and one essay within twenty-four hours. (I am a responsible student who will graduate and be a responsible adult.)

But what I do know is that the quote marks in the second sentence kinda suck. They’re straight (", '), not curly (“”, ‘’). Yes, no one really cares… if by “no one” you mean the most professional of professionals who publish four million books every year.

So if you want to stand out from the crowd, you better get everything right—even the seemingly insignificant. Use straight quotes only when you’re coding—which if you’re like most humanities majors, means never.

If you want to learn more, I recommend Smart Quotes for Smart People.

Ellipses

Can you figure out the difference between these two sentences? It’s very subtle, so take your time:

  • I like to string people along...
  • I don’t like to string people along…

Fine, fine—even I probably wouldn’t be able to tell. The point is that a dedicated ellipsis character exists; you don’t have to rely on a series of three periods. (Highlight the ellipsis in each sentence to see the difference.)

Some style guides recommend ditching the ellipsis in favor of three periods with nonbreaking spaces in between (. . .). (A nonbreaking space is a space that looks like a space but is treated like a letter in a word, so it won’t cause a word to “break” onto the next line. Got it?)

Honestly, that’s too hardcore even for me; I stay away from spaced ellipses unless I’m working on a formal document and the style guide specifically calls for them.

How to Type All These Fancy Marks

If you use a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, a lot of the things I talk about in this post will already be taken care of for you: they’ll ellipse your ellipses, they’ll curl your quotes, and in some cases they’ll even em and en your dashes.

But if you’re writing anywhere else, you’re out of luck. The best you can do is copy and paste your writing from Word or Google Docs—which is tedious, so you might as well not do it at all. Might as well give up.

Or should you?

If you wish to know the secrets of my dark arts—the forbidden magics that let me extend my dashing, curling, elliptical power beyond mere “word processors”—then read on.

Browsers

I use an extension called Instant Smart Quotes that automatically does everything that Word and Google Docs do—but in my browser.

  • Straight quotes become curly quotes.
  • Triple periods become ellipses.
  • -- becomes –.
  • --- becomes —.

It’s technically a Chrome extension, but you can install it in any Chromium-based browser, like Microsoft Edge (which is what I use) and Opera.

The extension works in 90 percent of cases—but in the 10 percent that it doesn’t, there’s the next option.

Everywhere Else

I use a mouse-gesture program called StrokesPlus.net. By holding right-click on my mouse and drawing a shape, I can activate various commands, like opening a new tab in my browser and changing the volume—all without touching my keyboard.

But the program also includes a text expander, which very much has to do with my keyboard. Basically, I can replicate the functionality of the Instant Smart Quotes extension without being in my browser, which is helpful when I’m writing in places like Slack and Notepad. As a bonus, I have a shortcut for the nonbreaking-spaced-periods variant of the ellipsis, because you can never forget about the nonbreaking spaces (which you totally understand, right?).

The only thing that this program is missing is the ability to convert straight quotes to curly quotes. But hey, 75 percent is still pretty good—and at this point, I’m willing to let go of that 25 percent.

If you don’t care much for mouse gestures and just want the text expander, I hear that AutoHotkey is a pretty good option. I haven’t tried it myself though, so I can’t personally recommend it one way or the other.

For folks on Windows, I also want to mention Microsoft PowerToys, which is a program that adds more functionality to your operating system. (A lot of these features already come standard with Macs and macOS, but shhhh.) One of the included utilities, Quick Accent, lets you quickly select characters like é—again, without your having to Google them—and all manner of dashes, including our dear friends em and en.

Going Old School

If all this talk of extensions and text expanders and programs is making your head spin, rest assured that you don’t have to download a single thing to get those sweet sweet typographical marks—as long as you’re willing to put a bit more blood and sweat and tears toward getting them.

The first option, obviously, is to Google whatever marks you need when you need them, then copy and paste them. Both macOS and Windows have clipboard history, meaning you can paste anything you’ve copied before—not just what you copied most recently.

For macOS, open Finder, click Edit from the top menu, and click Show Clipboard. For Windows, press Win + V.

Personally, I think Windows has the better system here: you can pin whatever you want to paste frequently, so what you’ve copied doesn’t go away after, say, your computer restarts. As a backup to everything I’ve described, I’ve copied and pinned all the dashes, curly quotes, and ellipses my heart desires to my Windows clipboard—so, even if one of my programs breaks down (and, once in a blue moon, one of them does), I still have Ol’ Reliable to come to the rescue.

But macOS does have one edge over Windows: it has better native keyboard shortcuts for inserting stuff. Here’s what I mean:

NameSymbolShortcut
EllipsisOpt + ;
Left single curly quoteOpt + ]
Right single curly quoteOpt + Shift + ]
Left double curly quoteOpt + [
Right double curly quoteOpt + Shift + [
En dashOpt + -
Em dashOpt + Shift + -
macOS keyboard shortcuts

Compare this with Windows, which requires that you type an unintuitive “alt code” to insert these symbols. And to even type these alt codes in the first place, you’ll need a number pad, which is usually only available on a wide keyboard—the regular number row keys on your QWERTY keyboard don’t cut it.

NameSymbolShortcut
EllipsisAlt + 0133
Left single curly quoteAlt + 0145
Right single curly quoteAlt + 0146
Left double curly quoteAlt + 0147
Right double curly quoteAlt + 0148
En dashAlt + 0150
Em dashAlt + 0151
Windows keyboard shortcuts

I kid you not: at one point, I had the alt codes for the en dash, the em dash, and the ellipsis down to muscle memory. But I lost my wide keyboard, and I eventually moved over to the much simpler methods above (or much more complicated methods, depending on how you look at it).

The End

I hope I have managed to rise above your dad and the local janitor in terms of interest. Eventually, I hope to surpass that cool-looking tree next to the library.

Dash, curl, and ellipse your way to glory—if not for my sake, then for the sake of copyeditors the world over.

>