September 23, 2011

Dashes, Parentheses, and Your Readers’ Attention

When you use punctuation skillfully, you can influence your readers to either skim over an idea or to pay more attention to it. Take a look at this sentence:

Just one team among baseball’s lowest payrolls—the Diamondbacks—is likely to make the playoffs.

Now compare it with this revised sentence:

Just one team among baseball’s lowest payrolls (the Diamondbacks) is likely to make the playoffs.

Do you hear an enthusiasm difference? The dashes emphasize the team’s name while the parentheses deemphasize it.

A proud fan of the team should choose dashes to emphasize the Diamondbacks’ accomplishment. And a rival team’s fan could use parentheses to make the Diamondbacks sound trivial.

Think of these contrasting punctuation marks as a kind of volume control. It’s as if you lower your voice when you use parentheses and raise it when you use dashes.

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