Here dashes are used instead of brackets because the apposition is a bit long, and the use of brackets is generally not preferred with longer phrases. It was only to be expected that Troy should fall, because the Gods and heroes on the Greek side-Achilles, Ajax, Athena, Hera, even Zeus, and many others-were among the most powerful and the most infuriated. The writer chose dashes because he felt that the parenthesis, comprising an independent sentence, justified the heaviest marks of separation available. The dashes could be replaced with round brackets. Paris abducted Helen with the help of Aphrodite-for how else could he have infatuated the King's wife?-and thereby started the Trojan War. The Trojan War was probably caused by a conflict between the mercantile interests of Troy and those of the Greek city-states, both powers vying for control of the important trade route from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean-even so, it is not inconceivable that personal feuds should have precipitated the war.Ī semicolon could have been used instead but the dash is supposed to mark the "sudden" change from mundane geopolitics to the more striking factor of romantic rivalry. A dash is often used where a sentence continues after an enumeration. The change from enumeration to question naturally breaks the syntax.
The Spartans, the Athenians, the Mycenaeans, the champions Ajax and Achilles-how is a single city to defeat such formidable adversaries? Here the natural flow of speech is emulated, though there is no interruption by another person. You and this Paris-but what did you see in him? This is perfectly normal in dialogue, and it may be used as a figure of speech in other writing as well. This is an example of an anacoluthon: a sentence whose syntax is broken off and left unfinished, whereupon a new syntactical construction begins. The servant's addressee apparently interrupted him with a question. While acceptable, the dash could be replaced with a semicolon or comma.Ī dash is particularly appropriate to mark a sudden change, as they often occur in unfinished sentences: This aversion to long sentences might be what motivated Gould's dash. I have a tendency to make too long sentences, because I like appending additional clauses as several long clauses set off by commas can make a sentence unwieldy, I would use a dash after some point, when I ran out of commas a dash is a strong mark that may divide a sentence in two more or less separate parts. I use it to mark off a phrase as I might say it in speech after having eliminated all other possible marks. Many style guides advise that it be used sparingly. That's why it is a bit of a lazy mark: you could use it anywhere, and it gives the reader little information about the relation between the phrase and the sentence. This could be an apposition, a summary, or even a phrase that stands in no relation to the main sentence at all, except by vague association. I highly recommend it for typing special characters that aren't available on a normal keyboard.The m-dash is used to set off anything parenthetical from the main sentence. Its author was careful to make it a very "lightweight" app that requires hardly any CPU time, so won't put any significant demands on your system. (You can also use it to do such things as running apps, or opening folders or websites.)
It then sits in the system tray and interprets your wishes. Its simple graphic interface lets you assign special characters or other text to the key-combinations of your choice. It's been around for years and has an excellent reputation.
#Using m dash free
Tonight I found a great, free little app called Clavier+. Resident script-based macro apps like AutoHotKey are available-but for something as simple as entering bits of text on key commands, they seem like overkill. I agree with this article writer, too-it's a somewhat kludgy method, requiring several steps just to enter one character.
#Using m dash windows
) is good, but with recent Windows Updates, it's become unreliable. The m-dash is used to set off anything parenthetical from the main sentence. Windows 10's pop-up emoji / special character window (Win key +. (Really, what difference would it have made?) Thing is, these days, many keyboards don't have number pads-and for some unfathomable reason, the Powers That Be decided to require Alt-codes be typed only on the number pad, not the regular number keys.
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