Jen Doll, “Writers’ Favorite Punctuation Marks” (The Atlantic Wire, Sep. 24, 2012).
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and language columnist for the Boston Globe: “When I revealed in a New York Times article last year that I’m overly attached to em-dashes, I was taken to task by the redoubtable John McIntyre, copy editor for the Baltimore Sun. ‘When you are tempted to use dashes,’ he wrote, ‘stop for a moment to consider whether you really want dashes there rather than commas or parentheses.’ Properly chastened, I’ve tried to tone down my dashiness. But I still admire the artfully wielded em-dash, especially used near the end of a sentence—when it works, it really works. (Some might have preferred a semicolon in the previous sentence; I can appreciate the affection for the humble semicolon, less flashy than the em-dash.)”
Read the rest here.