: Use double or triple minus hyphen (-) to stand in for em dash? Should I use -- or --- to stand in for — ? I've seen people use double hyphen minus, but some apparently use triple. It

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I worked as senior technical editor for 16 years for three major telecom companies (all based outside the U.S.) that had adopted English as their corporate language for all documentation; all the writers wrote in English. I always made a point of showing the writers how to enter the correct punctuation characters. Since typewriters were not an issue, we never used two or three hyphens in place of an en or em dash. Since the en dash is almost always used to show a range of numbers or connect non-hyphenated terminology, an en dash would never replace the em dash. Because there are many technical terms that are hyphenated, we all agreed that a space before and after the em dash clearly distinguished from hyphens in general and tended to increase readability.

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It depends on what you're doing with the text. In some cases, a double hyphen with surrounding spaces will be automatically converted to a dash, but that might not work with a triple hyphen. If you must enter text in typewriter style, I'd suggest using space and a double-hyphen for a dash.

It is much clearer, however, to use the correct characters, and with the widespread use of UTF-8, these should print correctly on most platforms.

In typography, a dash can be represented either as an en-dash surrounded by a space on each side – like this – or as an em-dash character with no spaces—like this. The en-dash with spaces is sometimes better behaved at line breaks, but the em-dash is arguably more correct. The en-dash is traditionally used mostly for number ranges (eg, 100–114).

These characters can be easily inserted on a Mac keyboard (Option-hyphen and Shift-Option-hyphen). It's more awkward on Windows (Alt-0150 and Alt-0151), but there are many ways to remap the keyboard or use a program substitute other keystrokes for dashes. (AutoHotKey is very good and free.)

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A double dash would be most correct. In fact some word processors will automatically change a double dash into an em dash.

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Use a double. Before I went to writing camp, I never even knew of the different types of dashes. But when I was there, I learned to use a double dash for em dashes. Congrats on knowing this type of stuff! Because not everyone knows... Good luck!

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