Remember girl here, today's topic is dashes.

Last week when I was speaking at the fields and writers' conference on Bambridge Island,

someone in the audience asked about dashes, when should she use a dash, and how is it different

from a colon?

Well, the difference between a colon and a dash is pretty subtle.

They can both serve to introduce a related element after the sentence, but a dash is

a stronger and more informal mark than a colon.

Think of a colon as part of the sentence that just ambles along, squiggly has two hobbies,

and now I'm going to tell you what they are, colon, cooking, and bothering art-vark.

A colon informs the reader that something more is coming along.

The words after a colon define or clarify what came before the colon.

The two hobbies before the colon are defined after the colon as cooking and bothering art-vark.

A dash also introduces extra material, but, well, a dash is quite a dramatic punctuation mark.

Think of it as a dashing young man is certainly not an ordinary young man, and if you're

dashing off to the store, you're not just going to the store, you're going in a flurry.

A dash interrupts the flow of the sentence and tells the reader to get ready for some

important or dramatic statement.

If you added a dash to the hobby's sentence, it would conceptually read something like this.

Squiggly has two hobbies, wait for it, wait for it, dash, cooking, and bothering art-vark.

Wow.

Normally, you don't want to follow a dash with something boring or mundane, so given

that there isn't really anything exciting about squiggly's hobbies, a dash may not be

...