Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'

I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?

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uberman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would always prefer to do:

"There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and, guess what, parentheses are right there for you."

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ryukoposting 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence and realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and guess what? Parentheses are right there for you.

That's what I'd do. Note the conversion of the first comma to "and," as well.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The parentheses bind tightly to "an addendum" and change the meaning

	▲	nananana9 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not with my brain's precedence parsing rules.

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pohl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your first sentence is a perfect example of why emdashes need to exist. The comma is overloaded, since it can be used both as a list separator and for parenthetical asides. But that first sentence starts using them as a list separator, and then inserts a parenthetical aside into the list. Emdash wins this test.

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thfuran 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think parenthesis are ideal for a parenthetical aside.

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readread an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer.

I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks like crap with parenthesis, as if the author should have thought of a way to avoid doing that, while with the m-dash there’s no problem at all.

	▲	oneeyedpigeon 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Em dashes don't nest (but that's probably a good thing).

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oneeyedpigeon 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's generally accepted that parentheses are more parenthetical than emdashes.

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customguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I just thought of the most annoying blog in the world. Individual spacing between words, depending on how thoughtful you want the pause to be. And by "individual" I mean a different floating point number denoted amount of em each. em > em-dashes. Or put differently, em dashes em-dashes.

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url00 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a bit like 2 space indention versus 4 or 8 space. I find the em-dash example pretty compelling because visually relaxes my eye more than commas do — similar to how prefer at least 4 space indention over 2.

(Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)

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zvr 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Microsoft recently introduced typing via Windows key plus hyphen (en dash) and plus shift (em dash). Much easier.

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thfuran 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think offsetting the em dash with spaces is contrary to almost every style guide.

	▲	oneeyedpigeon 33 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think this is a localisation issue; in the UK, it's much more common to see space-surrounded em dashes.
	▲	jachee 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Chicago does it one way and AP does it the other. I definitely prefer it un-spaced, though, personally.

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ryukoposting 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah. They also use em dashes to repeat a word with emphasis, something that is done much better with parentheses and italics.

> And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause.

> And also occasionally (occasionally) one just needs a random dramatic pause.

I know which one I'd rather read. Though, frankly, I'd prefer neither and I'm trying to remove this kind of thing from my own writing.

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lesostep an hour ago | parent [-]

I can't be the only one that reads those two examples very differently.

In a first example, the second "occasionally" is stressed, when in second example it feels almost whispered.

	▲	ryukoposting an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting, I read both as emphasized. To me, the parens make the voice clear but the em dashes make it read like a typo.