Typographical question for writers

[annathepiper]

So if you want to type a sentence that has a clause separated off from the rest of the sentence by an em-dash or two (like this: "Blah blah blah--blah blah blah--blah blah."), what is the proper way to type this? I have discovered that this is causing some word count discrepancies since the way I was typing it before was throwing Word's word count off.

Comments

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

You should just be able to do:

word (hyphen)(hyphen) word

.. and Word will autocorrect the dual hyphens into a single emdash, as long as you have a space on both sides of it. That should, really, be all it takes... unless I'm misunderstanding the question...

[annathepiper]

Well, I know Word does that... what I am trying to ask is more, what is the proper typographic convention for this sort of sentence construction? DO I want an em-dash in that kind of sentence? Should I have spaces around it? That kind of thing.

Ordinarily I wouldn't care but since Nanowrimo does have to verify my word count, I just want to make sure this is correct. :) I noticed that if I have "word--word" in a sentence Word does parse that as two words, but if I use the wc command on lodestone, that's parsed as ONE word!

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yes, you want an em-dash in that kind of sentence. I can't find a specific reference to whether or not there should be spaces before or after one, but most of the good examples of use I can find seem to indicate that there should not be spaces on either side of the em-dash.

Here's (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/emen/) one reference I could find after a quick search -- It's more targeted towards HTML, but also covers the general usage cases for various types of hyphens and dashes and the like, so should be helpful.

And, incidentally, the reason that 'wc' is that the wc command has a very... limited understanding of writing. That is, it considers words to be contiguous bits of text surrounded by whitespace. That's it. Since puncutaion isn't considered whitespace, word--word gets counted as one word, instead of two. And 'word -- word' would be counted as three. Go unix.

[wrog]

seems to me that unless you're using em dashes really, really often --- which I imagine would make for a rather choppy writing style --- it's not going to throw the count off that much.

[annathepiper]

It doesn't, but I'm anal! It's hitting the same portion of my brain that makes me hunt for two hours to find the math errors that throw my checkbook off by a nickel when I'm balancing it. ;)

[annathepiper]

So what you're telling me is, don't bother with wc for word-counting purposes? :)

(Thanks for the rest though!)

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I'd put a wordspace around both sides of the dash.

[annathepiper]

That's the way I've been typing it, but I wasn't sure what was really truly correct. I also noted that if I have "word -- word" then that's parsed as three words, not two!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Word count algorithms are so arcane and tricky that you're going to get different word counts using different tools no matter what you do. It might be a couple per cent over the course of the novel (50-100 words) Does NaNoWriMo have a standard wordcount program, or is it whatever the writer uses?

[annathepiper]

Their technical FAQ mentions a word-counting script that they use, and that it's very lenient and that a writer could maybe even gain a few words over what his or her word processor expects. Sounds like they rolled their own script, I guess. :)

I think I'll just have to shoot for some comfortable margin over 50K, just for safety's sake. Though this question of how to type em-dashes does interest me for its own sake as well!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Ahhh -- gotcha. Okay!

[poetry-lady.livejournal.com]

Interesting that they have their own. But in a way, that is more fair in the long run, I guess. They don't have to deal with people complaining that they didn't use the same word processor and therefore got "cheated".

As for the em-dash question, here's what I know about it from my "lofty" status as a tech writer. You don't use the spaces around an actual em-dash. I don't know how word(tm) counts this--and quite frankly, it might be different between different versions of word! (Oh, and I just used an em-dash there...) I would guess NaNoWriMo's word counter takes them into account and does them correctly. If you're really unsure, you might see if you can ask someone there a question...?

I generally go by these guidelines. Use an em-dash like you would use a pair of commas, or a pair of parentheses. The use of the three depends upon the emphasis you want to give to the phrase in between. Parens are typically used when something is an aside, something that is not as important to the material at hand, but is "nice to know". Em-dashs are used when the information is parenthetical, but you want to highlight/emphasize it. Commas are used when the other two cases don't apply, and you just need the commas to give the sentence the proper pauses it would have in normal spoken conversation.

I am not sure on the formal rules, as I studied them so long ago that I can't quote. I don't have my reference books at and, they're all at work.

[annathepiper]

This is plenty informative anyway, so no stress about not having the books handy, babe! Thanks for chiming in.

[wrog]

My theory is that the raw manuscript should be in whatever form is most convenient for you. I myself tend to favor practices that

1. make editing easier
2. make it easier to write scripts/macros to process the raw manuscript into whatever formats you might need.

For example, I always start each new sentence or major clause thereof on a new line. This means if I later want to rearrange sentences within paragraphs or clauses within long sentences, I'm just transposing lines (which happens to be a particularly easy operation in the editor I like to use (Emacs); YMMV). Having line-structure match up with sentence structure also has the interesting side effect of keeping me from straying too far outside the bounds of known grammar. Never mind that this is not a rule that you'll find in any style guide.

And then it's easy enough to tell Emacs or Perl to fill the paragraph and add the extra space after each sentence-ending period in order to produce the "official manuscript" format.

With respect to the various kinds of dashes, I

• type em dashes as three hyphens (---) surrounded by spaces
• type en dashes as two hyphens -- (no spaces)

The main point here is that this makes the different kinds of dashes visually distinct in a fixed-width font without having to use nonportable/nontypeable post-127 characters.

I'll admit that the spaces vs. no-spaces issue is a matter of visual taste; I think of em dashes as word-level elements whereas the other kinds of dashes are more intra-word. But since the style guides seem to disagree with me on this, you'll only see me doing this in raw manuscript, email, and LJ postings.

But the real point is that with em-dashes as 3-hyphens, you can now easily count up all occurrences of '---' and subtract from what wc gives you in order to get the super-accurate count of all True Words.

[annathepiper]

Wow, Roger, you're even geekier about this than I am. *giggle* Hrmm. Our housemate risu does the three-dash thing, too.

I'm with you on the "use what's convenient for you" concept, though. I've been saving each chapter out as a text file since that's most convenient for posting to the web.

[avram]

That dash-specification style is common among people who’ve used TeX, a bit of layout software that’s popular for writing computer science journals. Typing three hyphens specs an em dash in TeX, and two for an en dash.

[annathepiper]

Duly noted... I think I've heard of TeX at some point, though I've never used it myself. :)

[wrog]

Guilty as charged. I'll note that I've finally broken out of the habit of typing quoted stuff ``like this''

It annoys me no end that T_EX never really caught on outside of the math/cs community and that all of the folks who came along 10 years later to do their own version of desktop publishing decided to ignore it and reinvent the wheel... badly...

[agrimony.livejournal.com]

If you hit 50k in word's wordcount, you are pretty much guaranteed that the NaNoWriMo counter will count a higher number than that. As I recall, the counter doesn't actually tell you how many words it finds. It just verifies that you've got 50k. Anything above that is pretty much ignored.

[annathepiper]

Well, that's reassuring. :)

(Just crossed 14.3K, another 35.7K to go!)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

The proper way to do it for a manuscript you're going to submit is:

"The cabby--whose name was Gary, according to the posted driver's license, and whose seventy-third birthday had been three days ago--drove like the proverbial bat out of hell, while I clung to the seat and tried not to gasp too audibly."

For NNWM, I'd say it's -- that way -- because you get more wordcount. :)

[annathepiper]

Thanks Kit! I'd better stick with the proper way to do it so I'll be in practice--I mean, at least in theory, I do want to be able to actually submit something for publication somewhere in the not too distant future. ;)

Besides, as verbose as I am, I somehow am pretty sure that I won't have a problem! (14.4K and counting...)

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the word-count issue, but as for proper format in general: There are three things, a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash. In Word, you can type a hyphen. You can also type two hypens together--no spaces--and autocorrect will make it an em dash. Or you can Insert Special Character and get an en dash or an em dash. To put that interjection into the sentence, you use an em dash or the double hyphens as I have done above. In case you care, en dashes are still sometimes used by pendants (like me!) in date ranges and such, but you can safely ignore them.
Cathy

[avram]

The Official Word on whether em dashes take spaces around them is: You do whatever the style guide you’re writing for tells you to do. Or if you’re feeling lazy, you do whatever’s convenient for you and let the copy editor fix it.

If you aren’t following a style guide, you get to make up your own rules. Most style guides I’ve seen seem to say no spaces around em dash (but not all — the Associated Press house style uses spaces). Personally, I think that’s butt-ugly, so I use spaces.

[annathepiper]

Having had no style guide, I shall with whatever seems to get me the most accurate word count! (See, I told ya, I'm anal! At least about this!)

Thanks Avram. :)