Is it a writing faux pas to use long "em" dashes (—) too much? What should we be using instead?

When I was younger I was a huge fan of parentheses. (Maybe I still am!) I would nest them in other parentheses and most of my papers would be patchwork quilts of parenthetical sidenotes. However, this bewildering technique was slowly snuffed our by my teachers who liked being able to read teir students' papers. Since then I have supplemented my parenthese with a horrendous amount of em dashes. I stopped getting complaints, but I think it looks truly hideous (and you can't even nest them properly!). Is there anyhting I can use instead? How can I make my writing look less tacky?

  Topic Education/Schooling Subtopic Lifelong Learning Tags em dash
3 Years 1 Answer 1.8k views

Nemo Ignotus

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Answers ( 1 )

 
  1. Hmm...  You might try some elipses (the ... after "Hmm"); semicolons are also one of my big faves, but "em" dashes -- which can be replaced by two short dashes if your keyboard lacks a real em dash -- are a great way to simultaneously break your sentence up and indicate that the two pieces are "related" (not that there is anything wrong with parentheses [notwithstanding your {dictatorially pedantic} teachers' tastes] -- especially if you employ different TYPES of parenthesis for each level of [nested] parentheses).  

    UTC 2020-09-18 10:56 PM 0 Comments

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