* The theater tickets (ranging in price from three dollars to twelve) will go on sale Friday.
* Edna is a troublesome guest because she's allergic to all my favorite snacks (like chocolate, popcorn, and potato chips) and complains because I don't like what she prefers to eat.
The dash (composed of two typed hyphens) has become a strong punctuation mark with most commercial writers and has largely replaced the parenthesis.
If you delete the parenthetical expressions, the sentences make sense and still convey the information you want.
I use parentheses to include information
that isn't vital for the intended meaning.
Posts
So should I use parenthesis or a dash?
ReplyDeleteEllen, that's a good question. For most writers, the em dash has replaced parens.
ReplyDeleteWe used to say that that if you inserted an interruptive element—something that disrupts the flow—you used a dash (as I did above).
The words after the dash could have been set in parens because they explain by inserting words to clarify, which is what parens do. _As I did above_ could have followed an em dash.
These days, it's a matter of choice and reflects the writer's personality. I'm a dash-dash person and it speaks of the way my mind flows.
A slower, more reflective writer might have used parens for the first and a comma for the second, as I did above when I used a comma before which parens do.