pet peeve and its reflection

[eirias]

I was about to bitch about how students seem to be entirely clueless about spacing when it comes to hyphens, dashes, equal signs, etc. Then I found myself on a usage page which -- and here I illustrate -- tells me that my own usage of em-dashes is wrong; apparently you're not supposed to put spaces around an em-dash. Huh. Well, I still think my students' mistakes (poorly- spaced like this) have a worse effect on legibility than mine do, and in fact think the usage rule I'm violating is dumb. So there, usage guys!

Comments

[exilejedi.livejournal.com]

IIRC, the lack of a spaces around an em-dash comes from the newspaper world, where they couldn't afford the loss of character space.

I've seen a number of places that suggest that your usage of em dashes is acceptable even if it's not traditional. What your students are doing, however, is unforgivable and should be sternly punished. :-)

[cos]

.. and to be perfectly picky, ASCII doesn't have real em-dashes anyway. What's the usage rule about putting spaces around pairs of en-dashes? :)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

*G* Good question. No idea :)

[eldan.livejournal.com]

However, HTML does. ampersand#8121semicolon (replace the words with symbols - LJ is not permitting me to do this properly) gets magically transformed into —

[cos]

I know that, but it didn't seem relevant - I don't think she or her students are writing their papers for school in HTML, any more than they're typesetting them. (And even here on LJ where she could use HTML, plain ASCII is so much easier that everyone still does the double-dash thing :)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

No, but they aren't really writing their papers in plain ASCII either ;) -- Word automatically turns /--/ into /Ᾱ/. Er, that was supposed to be an em-dash, but for some reason eldan's HTML code doesn't work for me...

[gieves.livejournal.com]

(not that it's relevant to the original useage point, of course, but...)

— can be achieved by using — (or —)
& can be achieved by using & (or &)

HTML code fun!

[eldan.livejournal.com]

oops—it should have been 8212 not 8121