Dashes & Hyphens -- This is just a little confusing because there is a difference here between British and American English. They are used the ways in either version of English. The difference is in their names.
.- This is what Yanks call a hyphen. I think that Limies call is a half dash or just a dash. Linux programmers call it a dash. Traditionally, it's used to join two or more words together into an amalgam-word-thing.
-- This is what the Yanks call a dash. Limies call it a long or full dash. Instead of bringing things together, it separates words. In the book On Writing Well, William Zinser wrote (and I am going off memory here), "The dash more than any other type of punctuation is served by its very shape. It creates space. It forces a reader to pause before continuing to the next group of words."
I'm sort of a dash fanboy.
Slashes like / are also sometimes used in these ways. They link together two different words or phrases. I estimated the paragraph to be 30 yards/meters long. This practice was popularized by Kevin Siembieda who writes roleplaying games, and I hate it. Sometimes he uses it to separate and sometimes to bridge together, and I'm left puzzling out which it is by context. Am I supposed to be dividing 30 yards by 30 meters like a fraction? In the case of separating phrases in a title, it would work just fine. It does sort of imply action doesn't it, like somebody divided the title with a sword. What I'm trying to say is that a slash is edgy.
I guess that ellipses are another option though not the best... According to Stephen Colbert, these are read dot dot dot, but they are actually called ellipses, and their usage is the one thing that President Trump does correctly in tweets. In strict grammar books, ellipses represent something missing from a sentence. Words got pulled out of a quote which ran on for too long and ... was inserted into its place. The missing part might appear in the next tweet or on the next page, so they can legitimately be used to link together two separate messages or to connect my previous post to this one. That's all very handy indeed, but more often than not, this isn't how ellipses are used in practice.
People use ellipses to simulate silence or a pause in speech, especially inside of word bubbles. It could be argued that this is a valid usage because the thing taken out was the silence. I'm not fond of the practice because we already have the dash which serves that purpose better, but I will never be able to convince another person of it. Ellipses can be handy in this way to convey hesitation, shyness, or weakness. Look again at my first sentence two paragraphs up. Doesn't it look wishy-washy by my inclusion of ellipses?
