Use em dashes, and add spaces around them. And use readable type faces that read well with em dashes, because what if you have a span?!?
Use semicolons like there’s more to the point you were making.
Use colons (these are fine, geez) like you know what you’re doing with them. (For a good US publishing style, see Bedford/St. Martin’s Diana Hacker titles.)
And for ellipses, type spaces between the points, ya animals. (The idea of letting Word dictate my ellipsis style gives me that Inspector Dreyfus eye twitch.)
The Chicago Manual of Style is indeed a fantastic work – it bestrode the style of my Penguin books like a colossus.
Nonetheless, I’m still a fan of nonstandard, artsy, rebellious uses of the semicolon! Probably for the same reason I’m a fan of blogging. When the only thing between you and the reader is the “publish” button, a sort of generative chaos is born. When I’m getting paid to work within a house style I will submit on bended knee to the Chicago manual, but out here in the aether is it on; the semicolon slips the surly bonds of earth.
My username is more or less meaningless, chosen because I registered to correct some misunderstandings about German vocabulary. I guess I should change it to something neutral, like an UUID.
I was just giving you shit about that in conjunction with “Meh, using language accurately is for snobs”. (A sentiment I don’t always entirely disagree with, when I’m not arguing vociferously about the One True Quotation Mark (that absolutely isn’t an inch mark!!!).)
Depends which side of the pond you are on - opposite usage on opposite sides.
ETA , and @Brainspore, again, your prescription - especially the last part - only works in US. Elsewhere, the Em Dash example you use would instead use an en dash and leave a space before and after it. I have always disliked the US approach of using dashes with no spaces - almost looks like badly executed hyphens much of the time.
I recall seeing them in books from my youth but I spent much of my working life excising them. A colon was all that was needed 95% of the time and very occasionally a dash, but never both.
ETA (because BBS refuses to allow a new reply to a different post on a different aspect of this topic, so here they are all lumped together - sheesh!!) @bryan - yes, indeed; elegance demands either “in caves” or “on cave walls”.
Me: The cave is the surface on which they are scrawling.
You: The cave is the location in which they are scrawling.
We can both be right and the Internet will be saved!
As long as people are writing fairly coherent sentences with at least an attempt at proper capitalization & punctuation, I’m not that picky; as nowadays there’s way too many folks whose endeavors to communicate via the written word borders on outright illiteracy… like the current Orange Occupant of the oval office, for instance.
That said, I have a whole different reason for using semicolons as profusely as I do;
