THE DASH.

THE DASH. Annalisa annotated my copy of Henry Hitchings article. She noted that the most interesting part of the article for her was Hitchings argument that punctuation is being increasingly used for rhetorical—rather than grammatical—reasons. Hitchings main example is the increased use of the dash to imitate the “jagged urgency” of conversation. (Again, he also finds an aesthetic reason for the trend: dashes have “visual appeal”.) Annalisa notes that: “Nick and I use the dash very often.” I have also found myself using the dash more than I used to. I posted here about how the dash was used in the 1700’s for “oratorical pauses”, with a length of pause associated with each punctuation mark. I acknowledged in the post that Nick had pointed out that Lawrence Sterne had used the dash in A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY to show his protagonist’s rapid changes of mind. So perhaps the dash is reverting to its use a couple centuries ago.