Elements of Style

I must have managed sleep, because I dreamed the most awful of dreams. I dreamed that, for some reason I couldn't identify, there had been a public exposé of the em dash—that it had fallen somehow out of favor, and that it was not to be used ever again acceptably in written language. And I was seriously crushed—not to mention embarrassed, since I have used the thing semi-obsessively for years—and honestly wondered how I was ever going to write again with any flair (or at least I fancy I’ve ever written with some flair anyway).

I lean so hard on that beloved em dash; I think it has something to do with the Emily Dickinson class I took at Berkeley, in which we dissected—and I savored—Dickinson’s use of handwritten dashes of all lengths and angles in her manuscripts. And I like to think that my own proclivity to the em dash gestures toward that expressiveness. Not that I think I can fairly compare myself to Emily Dickinson, but you get the gist. (Also in my dream, parentheses were déclassé, and then I knew I was really screwed.)