: Re: Using dashes in writing dialogue Does anyone use em dashes (or two hyphens) to denote speakers in dialogue passages? Joyce does this as does William Gaddis. Many others. I practice it, but my

@Hamaas631

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There's no such thing as 'two hyphens' for an em dash. There's 3 types of dash in use, hyphen, en dash and em dash:

: - hyphen

: – en dash

: — em dash

The term traditionally comes from the width of the capital letter M in cold metal type and is a consistent width to size of the font being used. eg in a 12 point font, the em dash width would be 12 points. An en dash is the width of a capital letter N, or approximately half that of the em dash. A hyphen is generally the width of a a numerical figure in most fonts.

Two hyphens do not equal the width of an em dash.

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