A Dash of Style by Noah Lukeman Page B

Forster's novel A Passage to India:
    Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off— the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
    It is a bold decision to begin a book with a double dash. Few writers could pull it off without being overly stylistic, but Forster does, initiating one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. In this case the dashes help to propel into the limelight the notion that these caves, the only thing extraordinary about Chandrapore, are "twenty miles off"; he's letting us know that not only is there nothing extraordinary about Chandrapore, but even the one thing that might be considered so is twenty miles away. He's hammering home the point that Chandrapore is a wasteland; indeed, after this sentence there follows a long description of the utter bleakness of the town.
    Here's an example from David Leavitt's story "Gravity":
    Theo had a choice between a drug that would save his sight and a drug that would keep him alive, so he chose not to go blind. He stopped the pills and started the injections—these required the implantation of an unpleasant and painful catheter just above his heart—and within a few days the clouds in his eyes started to clear up, he could see again.
    The dashes here convey shocking, painful material as an aside, in an offhand way, allowing the sentence to carry on after such a dramatic clarification; by doing so, they show the insertion of a painful catheter to be just one more in a long list of painful routines, help demonstrate the tremendous amount of pain and discomfort Theo's had to undergo with his treatments.
    • Dashes and parentheses can be used to elucidate. The best writers always reread their sentences and ask themselves how different readers might interpret them. A sentence might, for example, be too complex or ambiguous, or open to misinterpretation. Crafting a sentence that can achieve a consensus of clarity is the mark of a great writer (unless it is your intention to be ambiguous). Sometimes the dash or parentheses can help achieve this clarity, and can do so maximizing word economy and narrative flow. In this example, a reader might be confused:
    His friend came with us.
    A reader might not know precisely which friend. But by adding a short, clarifying clause (via parentheses), the intent can no longer be mistaken:
    His friend (the redhead) came with us.
    The double dash can also fulfill this function, although not quite as smoothly:
    His friend—the redhead—came with us.
    Dashes and parentheses are particularly handy in clarifying a minor point in a pithy way. Few other punctuation marks offer this, can enable you to structure a sentence allowing for such a brief clarification. In the above example, for instance, you would not want to construct it as two sentences:
    His friend came with us. She was a redhead.
    The aside doesn't justify a sentence in its own right.
    The function of clarification is primarily a technical one, but it needn't always be. Clarification can also be creative, can, for example, be a great tool for humor, irony, or sarcasm. It can help establish a running narrative by the viewpoint character, allow him commentary. For example:
    He told me not to sit on the fire escape (as if I'd want to) because the structure was weak.
    Mom seated me next to my (unbearable) cousin so we could talk all night.
    Asides like these can also help distinguish viewpoint from description. If you decide to use them, they are better handled by parentheses than dashes.
    Doris Lessing was fond of parentheses. She used them often in her story "To Room Nineteen":
    That they had waited so long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible discrimination. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt) probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid, self-doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.
    Here the parentheses are