An Episcopal priest in Toledo worries that her sermons are cluttered with dashes. This works just fine when she’s preaching, but when the same text appears on her church’s website, it looks like a messy tangle of words and punctuation. The hosts discuss the differences between text written for oral delivery, and text written to be read silently. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Best Practice with Dashes”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Margaret. I’m calling from Toledo, Ohio.
Hi, Margaret. Welcome.
Hi, Margaret. How are you doing?
How are you?
Doing well. What’s up?
Well, I’m an Episcopal priest, and I spend a lot of time writing sermons.
And something that I’ve noticed in my writing, I think, is probably not grammatically very correct.
I use the dash a lot.
For me, it works in terms of oral delivery.
I think to space out my thoughts, but also because I write, you know, with an eye for the oral delivery rather than the written text.
I repeat phrases, say things twice in different words, that kind of what you do when you’re speaking out loud.
When I go then to take that text and put it into print, because we put our sermons on our website, or sometimes somebody will want a copy of it, it looks like a mess.
Too many dashes all over the place. So my question is, at what point do I have to give up the dash and just do a star new sentence, do a semicolon? The semicolon, you know, it joins the thoughts too closely together for my eye when I’m preaching. But when it comes to the written word, what are the limitations?
Wow, what a great question. What a great question. Margaret, are your parishioners complaining about all the dashes?
They never see them.
Oh, they don’t?
No, they work for me in terms of delivery.
By the time I clean it up and put it where they see the text, it’s very neat.
A lot of semicolons, a lot of periods, you know, no dash in sight.
Okay, so by the time you get your sermons on the web, they don’t look like Emily Dickinson.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
So you’re wondering if you can just go ahead and leave those dashes in there if it matters?
To what extent I could, because to me it looks more alive.
Yeah, and you could save yourself some work, right?
Because cleaning up text.
Well, and I’d like to have something in the written result, I’d like to have something that looks a little more like it was once spoken out loud.
Right.
A little more animated.
Yeah, because they are different creatures, aren’t they?
The spoken language and the written language.
I do know, Martha, you’re the same as me.
I think that you liberally use punctuation and spaces in order to indicate when you should pause or when you should emphasize something or when you should allow the person on the other end, if you’re doing a dialogue or a script, to take their turn, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m busted.
Marga, my emails are just full of dashes.
I mean, it’s ridiculous.
And I know exactly what you’re talking about, too, in terms of sermons, because I grew up listening to a lot of sermons.
And you do.
You kind of repeat yourself, and then you turn the phrase a little bit differently and turn it a little bit differently.
And it does, I’m sure, look really different on the page.
I think that you guys have both keyed in on something really interesting about the spoken word.
I know when I got into radio, coming to it from print journalism, I was shocked at what the copy looked like that I was supposed to read.
It looked so different from what I expected to be reading.
And I tell you what, Margaret, you listen sometime to somebody like Robert Siegel on All Things Considered reading an essay and just count the number of words in his sentences.
It’s amazing.
Those are T-90 sentences that he writes.
Yeah.
And if you saw it on the page, you would just think that’s not only bizarre, but it’s just not going to fly.
It doesn’t even look like prose.
It looks weightless even.
It almost looks contentless when you see it in print.
I think you’re doing the right thing, Margaret, when you’re cleaning it up because I suspect that the liveliness that you’re getting from that punctuation when you read aloud isn’t going to be there in print for somebody who didn’t write that script themselves, who didn’t write that sermon.
Good point.
So, Margaret, one of your questions here then is how do I convey this on the page, right?
How do I do the things that my voice was giving weight to and my intonation and my nodding to different people in the congregation?
And I would say that for one thing, we usually would advise never to use more than two dashes in a sentence.
I don’t think a sentence can bear the weight of two.
Right.
And I would just break them up into separate sentences.
I think if you allow yourself the two dashes, then you can work around that and just start a new sentence.
Well, that’s helpful.
You’ve reassured me because I think you’ve explained what I knew, but I had not really put into words that I’m doing a work of translation.
You are.
I’m cleaning from one kind of language to another when I clean it up on Monday.
Yeah, beautifully said.
Okay.
Well, I’m glad that helps.
Oh, that’s really helpful.
Thank you, and I’m so glad to have discovered your show.
Oh, yay.
Thank you for calling, Margaret.
We’re glad to be of help.
Okay, thank you.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Well, make no mistake, we’d love to hear from you.
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