EM and EN
The Trouble With EM ‘n EN (and Other Shady Characters) by Peter K Sheerin is the best article I’ve found on the En dash and the Em dash, and how to render them easily.
The em dash (—) is used to indicate a sudden break in thought (“I was thinking about writing a—what time did you say the movie started?”), a parenthetical statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead of a colon or semicolon to link clauses. It is also used to indicate an open range, such as from a given date with no end yet (as in “Peter Sheerin [1969—] authored this document.”), or vague dates (as a stand-in for the last two digits of a four-digit year).
The en dash (
–) is used to indicate a range of just about anything with numbers, including dates, numbers, game scores, and pages in any sort of document.
These characters are used so often by publishers — why don’t WYSIWYG pay them more attention?
Talk about EM and EN
Christina Wodtke
Frequently found under the title Principal Instigator, Christina currently is GM of Social at Myspace. She came form Linkedin, where she was developing new product and product lines. Previously, she founded Cucina Media and developed the CMS PublicSquare . Before that she founded Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design; founded the Institute for Information Architecture; wrote Information Architecture, Blueprints for the Web, built the Search and Marketplace design team at Yahoo!, leading reinventions of the search and shopping product designs and has spoken on the topic of the human experience in information spaces at conferences worldwide.
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*File under ’’Lessons not yet Learned’‘*
Probably this is the wrong venue for this comment. But that’s self-reflective; I’m writing to say, “Hey, how come I can’t find a place for feedback on site function!” So please do delete this as you see fit.
I wanted to relate how “Delete” on comments works from the Admin page but not on the story page.
And that you have <p> showing on your People page.
All of this /after/ saying, “Woot woooot! I love it!”
regards
—bentrem
p.s. if I sometimes sound cranky it’s because I’ve been at it since ‘72 and get impatient when basics are overlooked
Good news.. we have forums now, so go ahead and opine!