How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

Robert Bringhurst¹ prefers the en dash in the context of setting off phrases:

"The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.

"Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side."

¹https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780881791327/page/80/mode/...

I think of that as “British” style (as opposed to American). I think it’s more common here and I certainly prefer it

Presently re-reading this book, The Elements of Typographic Style. It’s one of the few books I’ve gone out of my way to get a physical copy of – it’s just beautiful.

And I totally agree, space-set en dashes are vastly superior to em. I dislike the way it connects the word more closely to the word in the next clause than the phrase itself.

E.g. He left—no explanation. Vs. He left – no explanation.

To me, left—no feels like a weird gluing together than a separator for a different section.

Because I am exactly the kind of person to obsess about this sort of thing, when I was working on my last book, I spent a lot of time deciding how I wanted to style dashed subordinate clauses.

Personally, I think en dashes are too small and look like a mistaken use of a hyphen. I really only use them in their Chicago Manual of Style recommended uses like date ranges.

But I agree that em dashes without spaces around them look wrong. They glue the adjoining words together when the whole point is that the clause is secondary and should be set aside from the surrounding text.

I ended up using em dashes with a little blob of CSS to put a tiny amount of space on either side.

So much this. Two weeks ago I learned that en dashes are used for numbers, but I thought they are what em dashes are for. Em dashes for me are too long and ugly.

"Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side."

"Used as a phrase marker—thus—the em dash is set without normal word spaces."

>the em dash is too long for use

above, the em-dash without spaces is smaller, at least in this typeface

I've taken to using dash offsets—just as an aside—in many places were I formerly used parentheses; I find it "less interrupts" the flow of the sentence.

Mr Bringhurst is wrong. Em dashes have nothing to do with Victorian aesthetics.

That's how you use them in Germany. N-dash with spaces around, instead of an m-dash, as Americans do.

Nope. Without the spaces, the dash doesn't set anything aside, it glues together. And with them, the m is of course longer than the n.