Writing coach and CUNY Journalism Press editor Timothy Harper tells us how to properly use ellipses, em dashes, and parentheses. FULL TRANSCRIPT: The default, typically, when we’re using ...

Writers can misuse or overuse hyphens, em dashes, colons and, to some editors' disgust, semicolons. Using a period is a ...

Do not use a hyphen in place of "to" or "through," except in dates. A dash is expressed as an "em dash" ( — ) in printing, is expressed in plain text as two hyphens ( -- ) and is used in place of a ...

In MS Word, type two hyphens without spaces on either side, and AutoCorrect will replace them with an em dash. Substitutes for it: As I said above, you can also use an en dash with a space on ...