How to Write an Em Dash in Microsoft Word

A hyphen connects a pair of words to make a compound word, like this:

I ate six slices of pizza and got a stomach-ache.

An em dash, though, sets apart elements of a sentence that explain something, similar to a comma or a pair of parentheses:

The traveling vacuum cleaner salesman—always a nuisance to neighborhood residents—hadn't been seen in several weeks.

The hyphen ( - ) is short, while the em dash ( — ) is much longer.  The two look different on the printed page and shouldn't be confused, though confusion often arises because there's no em dash key on a standard keyboard.  Many writers will type hyphens or double hyphens in place of em dashes, which look silly and unprofessional. 

Here's how to type an em dash using Microsoft Word:



1. Type out the text before the em dash, without a space.

2. Press the hyphen key twice.

 

3. Again, without using a space, type the word you want to follow the em dash.

4. Now, hit Space. Word will automatically substitute the em dash for you.

Alternately, Windows users can access the em dash using the Character Map, that long list of special characters like ©,  ¥,  Ω, ∆, and ♫, to name but a few.  To access the Character Map, click the Start menu, then All Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, and finally, Character Map.  You'll find the em dash near the end next to its seldom-used cousin, the en dash, and its special character cousin the horizontal bar.

Once you've located the em dash, click Select to pull it into the box at the bottom of the window, then Copy to add it to the clipboard.  You can then paste it into MS Word and other programs as needed.



Writers: use proper em dash formatting whenever possible!  It makes you look more professional, it's easier on the eyes, and it saves your editors manuscript cleanup time down the road.  You should also know the word processing tools of your trade the same way carpenters know their hammers, biologists know their microscopes, and golfers know their clubs.  There's no reason not to.

Officespeak Dissected: On the Overuse of Myself

From the Journal of Contemporary Linguistic Study, Volume 21, Issue 2:


Because Officespeak as a dialect spoken by middle- and lower-level administrative workers and bearing its own unique vocabulary, idioms, and grammatical structure has only recently come under the close scrutiny of linguists, many of its idiosyncratic uses (or usages, as Officespeakers would say) have not yet been isolated for further study. This journal proposes to chronicle some of the emerging distinctions drawn between Officespeak and our own variety of Common English.

One of Officespeak’s most widespread traits is its use of the reflexive pronoun myself to increase the formality of a sentence. Consider the following Officespeak sentences alongside their common English equivalents:

Example #1:
Mr. Graham and myself are expecting you in the meeting room by 3:30. (Officespeak)
Mr. Graham and I are expecting you in the meeting room by 3:30. (Common)

Example #2:
He gave copies of the guest list to Donald and myself to proofread. (Officespeak)
He gave copies of the guest list to Donald and me to proofread. (Common)

Example #3:
Return this letter, signed and dated, directly to myself. (Officespeak)
Return this letter, signed and dated, directly to me. (Common)

Linguists theorize that Officespeak’s use of myself in place of I or me deviated from Standard English in one of two ways:


Theory 1: Base Uncertainty: As in the first two sentences, Officespeak’s myself often appears when the speaker is referring to both himself and another person. The speaker may have been unsure whether to use I (a subject pronoun) or me (an object pronoun) and thus risk appearing unprofessional by making the mistake. Myself, however, shrouds the sentence in a more formal tone whose grammatical structure is more difficult to decipher (one of the dialect’s main purposes), ensuring that the mistake will not be noticed. Over time, use of myself grew to include sentences in which the speaker refers only to one person, as in Example #3. (For a more thorough discussion of this transition, see Hartwick pp 17-293.)



Theory 2: The Fear of Unprofessionalism: In common English, small children are often criticized by teachers and pedantic parents for making the following error:

X Josh and me got really wet!
O Josh and I got really wet!

The top sentence is wrong because the italicized portion is a subject, not an object. However, using Josh and me is correct when it serves as the sentence’s object:

O Ryan splashed Josh and me with water!

If this is still confusing, try reading the sentences without Josh around to muck them up:

O I got really wet!
O Ryan splashed me with water!

However, through overcorrection, many children learn to shun using Josh and me in both cases, thus transposing the taboo onto both subject (correctly) and object (incorrectly). When attempting to form a sentence that would accurately use Josh and me (see Example sentence #2), the Officespeaker substitutes myself, fearing that any use of Josh and me would be viewed as improper.  Kincaid M. Fowler, the theory’s leading proponent, reasons that Officespeakers attempted to escape their childhood humiliations instead of correcting them, and widespread Officespeak use of myself then grew to include subjects (as in Example #1) and objects without a second noun (Example #3).

Altered use of other reflexive pronouns (yourself, themselves, etc.) has not yet been adequately documented among Officespeakers, though the linguistic community is currently awaiting a promising study of the speech patterns of manufacturing accountants in the 128 corridor of northeastern Massachusetts.

The Mole That Poked His or Her Head Above Ground

All of my co-workers consistently misuse the genderless plural pronoun in place of a singular pronoun, as in the following example:

Someone left their book on the table.

Their is a pronoun used for more than one person (They left their books on the table), but here, only one person left a book. You wouldn't say Cinderella left their slipper at the ball because that doesn't make sense either.

People talk like this everywhere, and it's a reality I've grown to accept, like the prevalence of pro football or the existence of Crocs. Today, however, I found this in a kindergarten newsletter:

Every group of moles has a guard. The guard mole pokes his or her head above ground and warns the other moles of danger.

I was aghast at such an awkward, though grammatically-correct sentence from one of my co-workers. His or her head? What had caused such a pedantic shift?

I've come up with two explanations, possibly related:

1. Because the subject in question was the guard, the writer felt more inclined to use singular pronouns, as the is generally only used for one of something.
2. Because the sentence is about an animal, misusing their in place of singular pronouns seemed less appropriate.

Whereas in previous centuries, the teacher's sentence would have been commonplace, our language is constantly changing (and whoever be he who thinketh othewife might best have his head cleft clean from his body), and the singular their may be here to stay. I predict that in a generation or two, the casual their will be formally regarded as correct, and blog entries like this one will seem as dated as they are condescending.

Want to learn more?
The Genderless Pronoun: 150 Years Later, Still an Epic Fail
The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word that Failed

Snuck Sneaked In

Fill in the blank with the correct form of sneak. Don't think too much about the question, just write your natural response:

Everyone in the house was sleeping, so he _________ across the yard. [sneak]

Some of you (or most of you, considering how much of this blog's readership comes from people I know personally) may have gotten this brief survey in their e-mail last week. The issue came up in my advanced junior high school class when we were reading about a nature photographer who snuck up on a baby lion to get the perfect photograph. The wording was a source of confusion for one student, who checked her dictionary to find that "sneaked" or "snuck" were both acceptable, the former listed as "more formal." This sounded wrong to me, for I, as a native speaker of English, would never use "sneaked," and told the class as much.

The matter bothered me, so I did what most eikaiwa teachers would never do: I looked it up. (Or did a quick Google search, if you want to get technical.) A majority of what I found seemed to agree that while "sneaked" was the original past form of "sneak," "snuck" had more recently become acceptable (though some people, like Jennifer Garner below, strongly argued the contrary).



I was curious to see if more people agreed with Jennifer Garner or me, so I sent out the survey. Roughly 80% chose "snuck" as their past tense form of choice, some strongly, and some through great deliberation. (A few did the same Google search I did, or discussed varying situations in which they would use "snuck" or "sneaked," and I did not count these in the final results.) My trusty Random House dictionary says that, "SNUCK has occasionally been considered nonstandard, but is now so common that it can no longer be so regarded."

Students come to me to learn common English for social situations and practical use. They want to express themselves, understand what they read, and speak natural English that will not cause them shame or embarrassment. I would never correct a student who used a past form of "sneak" that I didn't agree with, just as I would never correct a student who used "hopefully" to refer to a future wish, or who used "their" as a gender neutral possessive pronoun. These are mistakes that millions of native English speakers make every day, and that all but the strictest of grammar critics would brush aside in natural conversation. Occasionally I have students whose English is good enough to understand and appreciate such finer subtleties, but for the rest there's no point in correcting errors that don't sound brutally jarring to the average gaijin.

Further Reflections on a Subject that Interests Only Me

A few weeks back I picked up a copy of the McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar (and by "picked up" I really mean pulled off my bookshelf where one of my apartment's previous inhabitants had left it) and started devoting a morning or two every week to expanding my knowledge of grammar, usage, and all those pesky technical terms. This may have been a poor decision since the Japanese Language Proficiency Test looms forebodingly on the horizon and I already had a lot of grammar and kanji to brush up on, but I knew it would be helpful for my writing, my ability to self-study, and my job. The latter was really the biggest contributing factor, as students will often come to me with grammatical queries ranging from the commonplace to the minutely detailed.

"I have a question," asked a particularly curious high-school girl after the lesson had ended.
"Of course," I replied in a tone of utter confidence.
"What's a modal?"

My blood ran cold as I leaned over the grammar page of her textbook (which was thankfully in English) and read a note about how to adjust the structure of requests using modal verbs with an example that did not make at all clear what a modal was. The other students were attracted by her question and looked at me in intense anticipation of some useful bit of information they could only get from a native speaker. There was a dead silence in the room as I ran through the sentence trying to figure out which of those words could possibly be a modal, a term I knew I'd skimmed over lightly in grammar textbooks a dozen times without bothering to understand the meaning of.

I waited as long as I reasonably could keep up the charade of interpreting the textbook example, then feigned an exaggerated note of recognition. "Ah, I see! Here, a modal is a kind of special verb in English, but don't worry about this too much. Basically, this sentence means..." (Here I lapsed into an explanation of the example sentence using the grammar we'd covered in class while dodging the initial question, which yielded thoughtful nods from everyone in the room.)

This situation happens more often than I care to admit. It is particularly humiliating when the question comes from one of my junior high-school students, a precocious girl who is studying for several major English exams and is interested in nuances so subtle that they boggle my mind. There is an expectation inherent in every class that a native-speaking English teacher will always know the answer, and to admit that I don't dashes students' confidence to a crippling degree. It also makes me feel like a gaijin hack who gets by using only his natural ability rather than any actual knowledge of English grammar, and it is a sad reminder that any English-speaking idiot can come out here, hold up the cards, play the CDs, and be an eikaiwa teacher. I guess I just want to do it better than that.

Some interesting facts I learned from my foray into English grammar:

• A modal verb is one of a special list of helping verbs paired off with other verbs to talk about the future or clarify other meanings: can, may, must, shall, will, and their past tense forms.
• The only English verb without a past tense form is must.
• In American English, commas and periods should always be placed inside quotation marks. However, in the rare case where a semicolon or a colon overlaps with quotation marks, it should always go outside. Question marks and exclamation points can go either way, depending on the situation.
• Went, the past-tense form of go, comes from the older English word wend, which also means to travel.
• Apostrophes were originally used only in place of omitted letters in words and contractions such as can't. During the Elizabethan era, grammar handbooks started recommending them for use in possessive forms as well, citing that the phrase Arthurs land was really a shortened form of Arthur, his land, and so the former needed an apostrophe: Arthur's land.
• Even after carefully studying that entire book, there will always be grammar questions I can't answer.