Using Dashes

Ugh, you're thinking.  Using dashes?  What a boring post title.  I assure you, this is definitely a boring post if you're not into the nuances of punctuation.  I'll try harder to be more interesting tomorrow.  But just in case you either missed the day dashes were taught in school or don't remember how to use them correctly, this post is for you.

Yesterday's post had three dashes in it.  At the time, I was pretty sure I wasn't getting the dash I wanted.  But I was tired and I pressed the Publish button.  This morning, I looked up dashes and discovered that while I had them in the right place, with the right intent, I had the wrong type of dash.

I didn't even realize there were three types of dashes, and each has it's own specific usage:

- figure dash, used in telephone numbers and mathy things
– en dash, named for the letter width of the lowercase n
— em dash, named for the letter width of the capital M

The figure dash seems to be the only dash a keyboard has by default.  On my keyboard, the dash key (to the right of zero) is the same as the minus key.  Even though that's the dash the keyboard provides, I needed an em dash to use when writing.

An em dash can be used to indicate a break in thought or to set off an appositive from the rest of the sentence.  First off, I personally have a *lot* of breaks in thought.  I think I speak with appositives regularly, so knowing how to use them in writing will be a good thing.  Secondly, I learned a new word, appositive.  I love learning new words.

From writing in Word, I knew you could type two dashes--like so--and if there were no spaces between the surrounding words, the double dashes would be translated into an em dash.  But I had no idea how to do this here, and in HTML.  That's what I did yesterday in the post—I used a double dash in place of an em dash.

So I read up on how to get other dashes included in my post.  As it turns out, it's pretty easy, as long as you don't mind a little HTML.  You just add — or – where you want the dash to appear.  Easy.  Today, not only do I have yesterday's post corrected, but I'll be able to use dashes correctly in the future.  And to think I used to hate English.

The Big Boy Update: He walks funny.  And when I say that, I mean he walks on the inside edge of his feet.  Some shoes make him look like he's a clown walking.  I'm guessing this is a phase as his legs and feet develop, but it would be nice to encourage good posture with footwear if we can.  Today we found him some flat-soled sandals that he looks "cool" in.  He ran around in them when we put them on, so hopefully he'll be walking straighter soon.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   She doesn't sleep if she doesn't want to.  There is really no napping if she's has set her mind to being awake.  She blew through the morning with no nap, complained about why food service wasn't earlier than normal and then didn't have enough room to eat a whole meal when she did get to eat a early.  But she's now decided it's nap time.  Nap time is good.