Spaced em dash?

My thoughts? No spaces.

nah, wouldn’t do it—it just looks bad—like the writer is trying to be proper and neat.

@oO: wow, even though i sent the above response with spaced em dashes, fluther still transmitted the reply with no spaces. guess that’s your answer buddy.

I happen to like putting spaces on either side of an emdash. But, I know this is not “proper”. But, you know, screw what’s proper. What do you like?

I vote no spaces

No space. Spaces take away some of
the umph of the emdash, don’t you think?

It’s a perfectly legitimate choice, and one that should be applied consistently throughout the publication. Hence the copyeditor’s involvement. I’m personally a fan of no spaces, but if the font’s em dash isn’t super long, then it will probably look ok.

The space em works on fluther — as long as you submit the actually character, not a dobule-hyphen. The spaced en works too – I’m not sure whether it looks better.

I know the rule is to close it up, but just to check on current practice I recently researched this in a selection of periodicals, including high-quality magazines (e.g., Harper’s), journals, and literary magazines. The verdict: no spaces.

Hmph. I always use the spaces! Back to the drawing board for me.

Thank you for the answers, personally I would choose the close set em dash—however it is really up to the editor on this one. I will see if I can convince!

My reason for this choice is that it is technically the correct way to set off a phrase, and the two spaces make it too long of a space. The large space is also messing up my rag.

Thanks again.

Update: we are going a middle way and setting an em dash with a thin space on either side.

I was going to chime in and say a thin space is what I use but it looks like you’ve already decided on that. It’s a nice compromise.

My old dog-eared (1994) AP Style Book has the dash separated from the text in its guidelines text, and this: “Put a space on both sides of a dash in all uses except the start of a paragraph and sports agate summaries.” So… it is a style-preference thing, and I suggest that you find out what your editor/publisher/reader uses/likes. For informal writing,I like the spaces, as the em-dash means, among other things, that we’ve arrived at an abrupt change or emphatic pause, so it/we deserve(s) a little space set aside.

Less of a space is more of an interruption. It’s probably best just to consider it as a rhetorical device, as all punctuation is.

“It’s probably best just to consider it as a rhetorical device, as all punctuation is”

I don’t know about that, I think punctuation is part of the piece as much as any of the words. If the sentences and paragraphs are garbage then it is probably safe to say the writing is too.