If two dashes, (an opening and closing), are required (and it appears it is (as befits what is essentially a quoting (or meta) mechanism)), then for the sake of scanning for accuracy, (and to inculcate a healthy fear of getting the pairing wrong), there should be a typographic distinction between an opening and closing parenthetical dash. But then some of us are just lisp programmers at heart (if you will).
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Be glad you aren’t teaching in the 19th century, then, when emdashes with commas were common usage.
eta: in Uk typesetting it is still common practice to use an endash with spaces for what would be an emdash in US setting.
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Yep. I ended up creating an alt key combo to easily add them since I use them often enough.
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here’s a question - would an m-dash cam have a line through the image?
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Here I’ve been using a hyphen all this time, like a plebian. Which way to the restroom, indeed.
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I have a deep hatred of the em dash because I discovered, accidentally, that Outlook and Word were taking it upon themselves to automatically include them when I did a space-dash-space. (There’s an option to turn that off, buried in the Deep Knowledge. Good luck with that.) This was done on a list of drawing titles intended for Autodesk Revit. Someone blindly copy-pasted the titles into the program, including the em dashes. Revit equally blindly created PDF filenames from those titles, causing Windows and .ZIP utilities to have screaming hissy fits about unrecognized characters but just pointing to an apparently innocuous dash. (Didn’t help that I’d never even heard of “em dashes” until that point.) Took me days to figure out why, including one completely blown deadline because I simply wasn’t able to select and upload the files. And you try explaining “no it’s a dash, not a dash” to a group of engineers and designers who consider proper spelling to be an optional extra.
So, yeah. Not a fan.
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At my old job we had that same problem with so-called “pretty quotes”. All modern tools (it seems) automatically convert old-fashioned shift-2 double quote characters into the matching left/right pairs from way down in the depths of Unicode. The problem is that virtually no art, design, or data pipeline tool can parse those damn things. We had bug after bug after bug in our software caused by someone copy-pasting data from Excel into a JSON blob, thus filling our data stream with pretty quote characters. It got to the point where I didn’t even need to debug the tickets anymore. Entire categories of bugs were always this. I could identify them on site and send them back to out data managers with a note to please stop copy-pasting from Excel because we can’t fix all these old tools we rely on, and nobody could find a setting to make Excel stop doing that quote conversion.
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I often do two minuses if an em dash isn’t available – it certainly brings the idea across but it only looks good with spaces.
Of course turns out that Discourse autotranslates two minuses into an en-dash…
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emmmmmmmmm- dash
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And there are so many ways of expressing those fancy quotes, especially in HTML!
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That was an n-dash, not an m-dash and spaces are mandatory. (On my side of the Atlantic, anyway.)
One of the few things I like about Word is that it will change a hyphen (n-dash) to an m-dash if you properly put a space immediately after the word you type after the hyphen and so long as there is a space (and only one space) either side of the hyphen.
You are, of course, wrong.
It should be (and you give good reasons why)
Me too - love 'em
This should be the rule everywhere. We need to reinvade and conquer to make it happen!
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I’m a technical editor, and I am fine with em dashes with no spaces or en dashes with spaces. If the author has used one, I’ll stick with it. If you want to get fussy, you can wrap your em dashes in zero-width spaces, which will break at the end of a line.
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my mistake. hit the keys to quickly. meant to —, not –. and spaces are a matter of taste, not rules.
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The Em Dash—often now incarnated without spaces—is a hallmark of
The only correct way to use the em dash is without spaces.
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You are, of course, wrong.
It is never used with spaces
I am, of course, being wildly hyperbolic. I find so many books where it’s not. Maybe it’s just the books I read, maybe it’s a style issue on different sides of the Atlantic — western side, here. Either way it needs to be fixed globally because it’s horrible.
We need to reinvade and conquer to make it happen!
Sign me up.
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Oh, it most certainly is. You will pretty much never see an em-dash with no spaces here in UK and if you do, you know the author or publication is US-based.
A US-based technical editor by any chance?
That’s where the em-dash goes from useful interesting to sucking. The lack of spaces is just plain evil, not to mention ugly. It’s the sign of the devil 
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I’m EIC of a nominally UK journal, whose style guide was written in England by Brits. The rule on em-dashes, which we enforce, is no spaces.
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i do change it up depending on the layout. i’ve even done them with hairline spaces around them, sort of the half-step between spaces and no spaces.
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I prefer «les guillemets»
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