Grammar Fiend Poll: Demarcating Subordinate Clauses

The em dash is a lazy cheat—but I love her!

And when you want a dramatic moment in the middle of your sentence—nothing beats the em dash.

I worked with an old-school copyeditor who would take out every em dash and replace it with a comma. Seemed puritanical to me. To many dashes make copy look ugly, but used sparingly they give a nice jolt that you just don't get from a comma.

Sorry, too many dashes .... (can't have uncorrected typos in a grammar fiend thread).

Ah, ellipses! Not that I see that with any regularity in formal writing, but on the Internet... that's another matter.

i def abuse em dashes — they look great as emphatic parentheticals — and commas are just so fucking overused

Parentheses! Something else I forgot! :(

is there any way to type an em dash on a laptop if you don't have a numeric keypad and thus can't use the usual keyboard shortcut? I usually just google "em dash" and copy the first em dash I see in the search results, lol. it's quicker than using the character map at any rate.

I don't understand why PC keyboards don't have an em dash key.

Does your laptop have the num lock key that you have to old down to use the alternative numpad keys?

i've found it easier - particularly on the internet - to use a single hyphen myself, but when reading i prefer en dashes

nope, no num lock key (xpost)

I normally use my own desktop, so the problem doesn't come up very often. it's still annoying tho.

Sorry, I didn't mean num lock, I mean something like the Function/Fn key. Sometimes around the right-hand part of the keyboard (i.e. around jkl) the keys have numbers in a different color, find the control key that matches that color and tap away etc.

oh yeah, that does it! (FN + Alt + 0150)

tbh even when I'm using my desktop I tend to just look for the symbol online rather than keying in the Alt + numpad shortcut.

*0151

or rather, Fn + Alt + MJIJ. it's still convoluted as fuck — and it's no faster than googling — but at least I know how to do it now.

:D

I tend to use a blend of commas, dashes (en or em, depending on the style guide I'm following, though I usually default to en), and parentheses, according to some vague instincts of syntactic hierarchies in the given sentence. I suppose it's a bad habit of mine, making sentences that are so complicated that I have a de facto system to indicate multiple or even nested subordinate clauses.

come on unreg you should know better than to put spaces around em dashes. this is the grammar fiend poll after all, no place for radical anarchist punctuation here

em dash is much overused. commas are much overused, too, but are appropriate for this use.

this poll doesn't make any sense.

I am a hueg fan of parentheses when dropping a parenthetical statement into a sentence (of course, as a proponent of such statements I cannot be otherwise).

commas are underused these days imo

and god, en dashes in place of em dashes look horrendous

Hyphens have proliferated in my intra-office emails of late.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i used to use tonnes of parentheses but in the last few years they've been significantly supplanted by the en dash, which i think implies some change in tone but i don't quite know how exactly.

I remember in my school days something about parenthetical clauses falling out of favor, and kind of buying into that without questioning why.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

1. Forgot to vote. :\ Would've done en dash probably.

2. Really hoping the two votes for semi colons were loljoeks.

these are all weird things to use for subordinate clauses

Commas do make sense for subordinate clauses sometimes, don't they?

yeah. i overuse en dashes. this thread is making me consider switching to the EM but i don't think they're quite as easy to make as the double hyphen en dash

sorry the "yeah" was in response to the question about commas. they do make sense, and often are a better choice than a dash.

oh, i forgot commas were an option.

*bump*