Standpoint Online has an essay about the sudden glut of em-dashes in writing, rather than the delightful semicolon. Some people are getting pissed off about it.
From the story...
Bryony Gordon, in the Sunday Telegraph: "Other, more sane [sic] women would see this as a reason to get lost - I just view it as a challenge." John Conroy, on the Daily Telegraph's letters page, whose editing is ordinarily impeccable: "Browsing for a book is not the same as going into a clothes shop - it is often a highly personal experience."
Incorrect? No. But 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. A brace of em-dashes can insert interstitial comment without implying the sotto voce of parentheses (which always have about them the suggestion of gratuitous and undisciplined digression; they seem to signal that you won't miss anything if you skip over what's inside). A single em-dash can set a phrase or clause apart, just like a comma - but with a more emphatic pause.
Yet the abundance of em-dashes scoring - modern - writing - like - Morse - Code should surely be curtailed, if only to relieve the monotony. Since you can bung them in any old place, em-dashes are the resort of the lazy. The citations in my first paragraph might both more artfully deploy the sadly unfashionable semicolon.
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