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Like that, or without the first comma?
I wanted to do the exact same thing in a story I was working on yesterday. I found this article on speech tags, etc, which I thought was quite useful:
http://www.crayne.com/articles/Dialogue--How-to-Punctuate,-Use-Tags,-and-Vary-the-Structure-of-Your-Dialogue.pdf
On a slightly different subject, I always wondered where authors got those 'long' dashes from. I've always used the short ones, but have never been happy with them. Now I know, I'll have to 'replace all' the tiddly ones for the special elongated versions, without messing up words like...
*thinks*
'newly-informed'.
I feel enlightened!
My version of Word automatically replaces [space][hyphen][space] with a long dash. In Scrivener, I need to type a double hyphen (i.e. --) to get a long dash.
How do you get an em dash?
Really? That's something else I didn't know and have done wrong for years! Dang, dammit and drat. I'll have to go through and remove all my -ly hyphens now!
Do you know how much work you've given me today?!! ~X(
The more time I spend on this forum, the more convinced I become that I should sign up to adult literacy classes. #-o
Friendly-looking against friendly looking - hyphen needed for the correct context.
*waits for TN to put 'em all back*
My Word 2007 creates a long dash after I've typed the space after the word after the dash, so to replace an iffy one I delete the short dash, retype it, add a space and m and then a space, then go back and delete the m.
Serves me right for getting it wrong in the first place!
'We should be there in about' (he glanced at his watch) 'ten minutes, I'd say.'
We should be there in about'—he glanced at his watch—'ten minutes, I'd say.'
The dashes are to show that you've inserted something, a sort of parenthesis. Therefore you wouldn't need the first comma as you wouldn't with the brackets.
Short dashes are en dashes. Long ones are em dashes. Now, there are rules (you knew there would be) about them.
For a start em dashes don't come with spaces either side.
The em dash is used when—for instance—you insert a clause or break off a speech. 'You don't mean to say -' would be ‘You don’t mean to say—' The em dash doesn't take a space, but it is increasingly being replaced by en dashes with spaces.
So it depends on the house rules which you choose. I can't get an em dash without looking in symbols in Word because I can't work out how to do ALT+CTRL+Num -
I haven't tried in Scriv yet, but I'm sticking with en dashes unless told to the contrary.
For the purposes of this post, I copied and pasted one from Word and just kept copying and pasting!
Baggy said: I'd actually consider hyphenating it, TN - depending on the message and context.
Friendly-looking against friendly looking - hyphen needed for the correct context.
*waits for TN to put 'em all back*
Luckily, a friend popped around before I had chance to meddle with my dashes and adverbs...
“We should be there in about…” he glanced at his watch, “ten minutes, I’d say.”
The ellipsis is a break, same as a comma. One replaces the other. Not a clue if this is right, but it’s the way I would write it. Not really a major issue unless every other letter, word, and use of grammar in the story is spot on and you’re ready to send now, now, now!
He glanced at his watch. 'We should be there in about ten minutes, I'd say.'
Doesn't book look odd the more you write it?
Especially baggy ones.
"We should be there in about..." He glanced at his watch. "Ten minutes, I'd say."
Avoids the tricky comma after watch which doesn't really fit with the speech marks that follow.
Whereas a pica is a fixed-width space (one-sixth of an inch, remember) irrespective of the font being used, the width of other spaces will vary according to the font. An em space, or an em dash (which is a dash of the same width as an em space, and is sometimes called an em rule) is based on the width of the capital M in the font being used.
The em space, or simply the em, can be used as a unit of measure when specifying layout. For example, you could specify that paragraphs are to be indented two ems. In GuideML, using the
That's the bit I couldn't work out! It's the dash on the number pad, not Num + -
Thanks, Betsie!
I'm going to stick with what I've been doing so far. If an agent finally realises the worth of my writing and actually signs me up, some professional can help me iron out the wrinkles.
And I thought if you used dots to indicate a pause for thought, you were supposed to type space dot space dot space dot . . . and another space if it ends in quotation marks. No? Oh well . . .
I have a question regarding something I'm working on. It's written in the third person, and I'm trying to explain why the character is so besotted with someone. I want to show how intensely he feels by the repetition of 'so', and then want to slow the pace and create a pause for the reader after the final 'so', to highlight that intensity.
I have written:
Instead, just one taste had launched an affair so dazzling, so glittering, so - unstoppable – it had become a threat.
My question is: have I used the dashes correctly to achieve that?
p.s. I have no interest in re-writing the sentence, I only want to know if my en dashes are right.
p.p.s. I have tried to find the answer, but it isn't easy to find an example of what I'm trying to convey.
so... unstoppable, it had become a threat.
as though he is thinking about it.
:-\"
I've changed a dash to a comma. If you have a dash before and after 'unstoppable', the sentence has to be readable without it, which it wouldn't be: 'so glittering, so it had become a threat.' The hiatus you want is before 'unstoppable', to imply that he can't quite find the word to explain it.
Otherwise you could have:
'Instead, just one taste had launched an affair so dazzling, so glittering - so unstoppable - it had become a threat. '
Another alternative would be to put 'unstoppable' in italics, if you're using them at all, and lose the dashes altogether.
Dashes don't usually signal a pause. They can be used - as in this example - to add a 'side note' to a sentence, in the same way you'd use parentheses or, for that matter, a pair of commas. Or I could have used one instead of the colon after Claudia in my first sentence - like this.
I'm not aware of ellipses being poorly regarded in literature. I've seen them used often enough, although like anything I would advise against using them too frequently. Too many on a page can look very... untidy.
What I didn't mention, is that this is a very short piece of flash, and this happens twice. A later sentence reads:
How could such rapture, such – passion - be harmful?
I want to keep these 'hesitations' because they are very much part of the rhythm of the prose and characterise the dilemma the character is faced with.
If Mrs Bear's solution of a dash followed by a comma is still incorrect, maybe I will have to go with italics instead as I definitely don't like the idea of two sets of ellipses.