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Dashed Bad Form. "Examples of a punctuation mark that is raging through contemporary prose as rapaciously as clostridium difficile is contaminating our hospitals: the em-dash. The em-dash is eating semicolons for breakfast. Not that we should disparage the em-dash - I use it myself, albeit, like many of my peers, often to excess - for this serene horizontal line exhibits a pleasing flexibility. It may substitute for the beleaguered semicolon, and link the constituent parts of one complete thought."
And here I've been using ellipses for this purpose online since the early '80s. It's a habit I started cultivating when I realized that impromptu messages were likely not to have proper sentence structure much of the time, and could therefore be expected to defy traditional punctuation guidelines.
(I'll still stick up for the semicolon, though; nothing is better for linking a pair of related thoughts.)
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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