How To Use Dashes For Parenthesis

Use this spag lesson pack to help children understand how to use dashes to indicate parenthesis.

How to use dashes for parenthesis. In general you can think of parentheses commas and dashes as a continuum of marks. After all why include an aside in your writing jarring to the reader when you can just compose two sentences. Use an em dash to join independent clauses. The dash works somewhat like parentheses or commas but it is used where a stronger punctuation is needed. You use them to surround something that seems a bit out of place in the sentence an aside a clarification or a commentary.

Dashes are punctuation marks used to set off non essential information to loosely connect two thoughts or to mark a break in the sentence. A dash is a versatile punctuation mark that can be used within a sentence instead of brackets or a colon to show parenthesis. How are dashes used. Also remember that a dash is composed of either an em dash first three sentences above or en dash bottom sentence. In other words if you want to include information that is not absolutely necessary in forming a complete sentence but that is important to the idea you are communicating introduce this information into the main sentence between dashes.

The powerpoint explains how dashes can be used in pairs in a similar way to brackets to add extra information to a sentence nbsp as well as using the double dash children will also. This is the main for shelving parentheses at least. Unlike parentheses the dash is quite popular in news writing in all types of writing really. Let the parentheses die a quiet death alone and unused. Dashes can be are used as an alternative to other punctuation marks to.

Let s start with those quiet parentheses. A dash mustn t be confused with a hyphen which is used to combine words together and is slightly shorter in length than a dash. Most commonly a dash connects an independent clause with another with a related thought plus a conjunction like or but yet as for and after the second dash. To start with just the first item on that list we can. You can also use two lines not just one which is a hyphen 9.

To set off parenthetical material that you want to emphasize. Dashes have three uses. The dashes can be found under special characters. Parentheses are the quiet whisper of an aside commas are the conversational voice of a friend walking by your desk and dashes are the yowl of a pirate dashing into a fray.