40c Use dashes.

40c
Use dashes.

Use dashes to insert a comment or to highlight material within a sentence.

The pleasures of reading itself who doesn’t remember? were like those of Christmas cake, a sweet devouring.

—Eudora Welty, “A Sweet Devouring”

A single dash can be used to emphasize material at the end of a sentence, to mark a sudden change in tone, to indicate hesitation in speech, or to introduce a summary or an explanation.

In the twentieth century it has become almost impossible to moralize about epidemics except those which are transmitted sexually.—Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

In walking, the average adult person employs a motor mechanism that weighs about eighty pounds sixty pounds of muscle and twenty pounds of bone. —Edwin Way Teale

Dashes give more emphasis than parentheses to the material they enclose or set off. Many word-processing programs automatically convert two typed hyphens with no spaces before or after into a solid dash.