Punctuation Inside Em-dashes

The following lines of dialogue are from R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before. I've opted to post it in italics to help differentiate it.

"The North is wilderness, Achamian. Sranc and ruin. No. They look south—to us!—and plot with a patience that beggars the intellect."

Note the exclamation point, specifically where it's been placed. For me it gives the impression of a sentence within a sentence. I understand the intention behind it, but I wonder if there's a better alternative.

Should the need arise, would any of you punctuate your dialogue like this? And if not, how else might you write it?

 

I rather like em-dashes but I don't think I have ever put punctuation, particularly exclamation points inside them. But I do like the effect...might have to add it to my bag of (borrowed) tricks.

 

It reminds me of early English—Victorian or earlier—when rules were very loose and still being codified. Possibly that fits the type of story?

 

Oxford Guide to English Usage - see top of p.195 (publicly available but needs an account to access)
https://archive.org/details/oxfordguidetoeng00wein/page/194/mode/2up

'I didn't—' 'Speak up boy!' '—hear anything; I was just standing near by'

 

I've never used it in this way and I doubt I will, but it's funny because before today I could've sworn I've never seen punctuation like this, and yet today I saw it two times. First earlier this morning watching a new show with subtitles on and now today with this post.

 

Fix'd

 

Me too, and the movie as well. We actually had this discussion before. In fact it's where me met, or where we realized we share a liking for the Innsmouth stories.

Aaaaand we're going off-topic...

So yeah—I'll be gosh-darned!—how 'bout them-thar excly-may-shun points inside em-dashes, huh?

 

Noted a sentence while reading King's IT today and was reminded of this thread.

It seems like a bad idea to me, but hey! they might always take after his wife, right?

In this case there are no em-dashes, but the placement of the exclamation point is similar.

 

Tangential point- but did you notice how many times that booked contained the line “[character] shrieked”. It’s like Frank Herbert’s use of the word “presently”. Once you see it, it won’t go away.

 

Yeah, no problem. Em-dashes are kinda my duct tape anyway. If I can't figure out a better way to do a sentence, I'll just stick in the em-dashes. As far as I'm concerned it creates a sentence within a sentence, and a sentence can have punctuation. Anything for readability. The stuff I write is ridiculous enough on it's own. Normal people need all the help they can get if they wanna read it.

It's weird how that works, yet goes against any rules I might have learned about punctuation. Exclamation points, question marks, anything with a period quality ends a sentence. The next word needs to be capitalized. If I'd have written that:
1. I would be doing pretty well for myself now.
2. I would have probably used a comma.

 

I think I would, yeah. In fact, it seems I've already done it; I found these two instances in one of my WIPs:

"The vaunted Face of God—on display for a limited time only!—whose mere proximity heals the most tenacious of ailments, mundane or mystical."

"You two—and that goes for all of you in the back there!—will have to go back the way you came."

(No, they're not the best sentences, being as they are extracted from a semi-rough draft, but I don't think the !— does them any harm)

In the first one, the stylistic intent is much the same as in your Bakker example. In the second, it's meant to denote a shift in the target of address plus a raising of the voice. I'm fond of em-dashes in general, and I rather like this construct, but it's one I believe is best used sparingly. I hardly think I've abused it; these examples are the only ones I found in a 130k word document, on pages 11 and 493 respectively.

How are you enjoying the book, by the way? That snipped made me quite nostalgic for Bakker's style of writing.

 

I finished it; and to be honest, I have more problems with the book than I have praise. The characters, dialogue, and to a lesser extent the story’s tone, never quite reached the right temperature for me.

 

Absolutely mainstream, at least in the kinds of books I usually read. Not exceedingly common, but shouldn't raise any eyebrows.

I just the other day started a thread with examples of most of the standard models (all the ones I recalled offhand) for capitalizing and punctuating in dialogue. Perhaps I put it in the wrong forum, I don't know. I put it where I'd seen previous discussions of punctuation, and didn't consider this forum. But the model you're asking about is one of the ones I included. As I recall, it's mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style.

Dialogue Punctuation Redux (Feb 2022)

There's a lot of odd advice floating around on advice websites. I mostly ignore such sources, relying on published, acknowledged authorities and especially on fiction published by the better divisions of major publishing houses. Not everything that was standard in the fiction industry was codified in reference manuals; so for me, nothing beats established editorial precedent during the last 2/3 or so of the 1900s—though even there, one finds occasional outliers.

Practices that everyone in the industry knew and took for granted have been gradually slipping since maybe the late 1990s, and apparently by accident rather than decision. (I think it's because so many 'non-writers' started writing prolifically and visibly on the web, speeding devolution.) That's when the Hodges Harbrace Handbook — the Bible of Freshman Composition — realized they needed to add a comma rule explicitly stating that the comma goes BEFORE a FANBOYS conjunction, not after it. ["13b Avoid using a comma after a coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet)."] Until around then, it would never have occurred to anyone to put the comma after For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So, or comparable conjunctions. But students began arriving to university who'd seen that mistake all the time, growing up on the Web, and thought it was prescribed.

Then there's The New Yorker, which has always been a deliberate outlier with its e-diaereses, its o-diaereses, and particularly its faux-fusty use of commas in the vicinity of conjunctions. I liken TNY's punctuational and other quirks to the proud wearing of a peppermint bowtie. Unfortunately, a few of these quirks set the wrong example for writers uncertain about what is standard in punctuation.

It's not uncommon in literary fiction published in the 1900s to find a semicolon between parenthetical em-dashes — outside, inside, or interrupting dialogue — and if one looks hard enough, it's even possible to find a period, or even two, inside what is effectively an em-dash parenthetical insertion. In writing intended for readers with a high reading level, you can even find a full, distinct, standard paragraph interrupting a sentence (or more likely a paragraph) of dialogue, with an em-dash-quote concluding the paragraph before it and a quote-em-dash commencing the paragraph after. However, I wouldn't try to get that past an agent selling popular fiction. ("However" is one of several special cases regarding the comma following it. The comma disambiguates one meaning and function of the word from another.)

 

Been advised by a proof reader recently that the humble en dash – can sit in place of the em dash — . Many a year I've had the hyphen chain compound nouns and inconvenient line breaks, the en solely for ranges, and the em for (almost parenthetical) extra info. I believed I had it nailed. It's just occurred to me the advice may melt into a mess were I to put... well I'll put it.

In those years he moseyed along—1977–1982, Miami-Dade–Milton-Freewater—minding his own and nobody else's business.

Also, @Also , were you referring to this article on diareses?

 

I've also read, though where I can no longer say, that some houses use en-dash with a space on both sides, while others use an em-dash with no spaces. Word follows that convention in its automatic conversion of double hyphens, to wit: a--b auto-converts to a—b, while a -- b auto-converts to a – b. With either style, the abrupt cut-off of speech uses an em-dash without a space. "You told me—"

I even read somewhere that British publishers prefer the em-dash without spaces, while American publishers prefer the en-dash with spaces. But I don't recall seeing that reflected in any of the books I've recently looked at. I'll have to take another look with that in mind. In books from the pre-digital era, there may be a difference between practice in the printed version and the e-book.

I've tried out both ways in my MS, and still haven't decided which way I'll go in the end. When I use em-dashes in it, I use them without spaces; but in forums like this one, and especially in emails, I use an em-dash with spaces for improved visibility. In my Firefox, the em-dash looks the width I'd expect for an en-dash. I recall that line breaks in Word have some relevance to the decision. I don't care whether a mid-sentence dash goes before or after the break, and so en-dash works better. But of course you can't split "You told me—" between the me and the dash, so Word moves the word and the dash to the next line if there's no space. If I self-publish, I may well use the em-dash with spaces mid-sentence.

 

I'd suggest looking for a different proof reader.

https://www.writingforums.org/threads/hyphens-and-dashes.171746/

 

Resisting the impulse to research and post a treatise, I will instead post a single example from the 1993 republication by the respected or possibly even prestigious Folio Society of Jean Rhys's 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea.

In the afternoon Amélie brought me a second letter.

Why you don't answer? You don't believe me? Then ask someone else – everybody in Spanish Town know. Why you think they bring you to this place? You want me to come to your house and bawl out your business before everybody? You come to me, or I come—
​

At this point I stopped reading. The child Hilda came into the room and I asked her, 'Is Amélie here?'​

There we see an em-dash — the difference is subtle in some online fonts — at the very end, and an en-dash with spaces between else and everybody. Despite the dialect here, practice is consistent throughout the book.

The same publisher's — I inherited all of these — 1993 edition of Huckleberry Finn uses em-dashes with a clear half-space before and after, or only before in the case of interrupted speech.

The Heritage Society's 1964 edition of The Prince and The Pauper uses en-dashes without spaces throughout, even for interrupted speech.

Penguin's 1982 paperback edition of Nadine Gordimer's Six Feet of the Country uses en-dashes with spaces, even for interruptions. It does the same in its 1969 paperback edition of V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men — and what big, fat spaces they are that surround the dashes!

Harcourt Brace's 1993 hardback edition of André Brink's Imaginings of Sand uses skinny en-dashes with fat spaces around them in all instances — even to end interrupted speech, and even before the closing quotation mark.

By selectively choosing from the very little that remains of my corporeal library of English-language fiction, I could probably make a case for the predominance of either practice. En-dash with spaces and em-dash without, and even a few in-between variations all appear to be widespread in the world of published fiction. I do believe that unspaced em-dashes predominate in my books by UK/Commonwealth authors, but it appears to be far from a rout overall. That doesn't mean there aren't authorities who proclaim it must definitely be one way or the other. That's why I temper authority with empirical precedent.

This didn't become a treatise, right? Even though it became more than the single example? I just stepped three feet and picked books off the shelf on impulse, and reported whatever I found.

 

In a post above, Seven Crowns mentioned "house styles." We've pointed you toward the currently generally accepted "rules," but they aren't etched in granite. Writing or publishing a book isn't a Ph.D. thesis, for which you will be down-graded if your punctuation doesn't conform exactly to the prescribed manual of style. If you sell a book to a commercial publisher, they'll use whichever type of dash their house style prefers. If you self-publish, you can do whatever you choose. Just be consistent in what you do.

 

Thanks for the digging and analysis @Also , clear and informative I tracked back and found the en over em suggestion on the website the proof reader works for @Seven Crowns. Just following orders (it seems they were). FWIW there's much contradictory advice, I've spotted, on the whirred wild web. But...there was a consistency in saying the en's sometimes a preference in British English, case confirmed by Jean Rhys's use. I'm going to pick the devil I know as it follows a logic and chimes my bells of understanding. Like @SapereAude says, be consistent and bend to the will of a house style if you must.

 

Because it’s not a word?




Is it?

 

Possibly your subconscious is telling you that Insofar would make more sense there?