Expressive Punctuation: Em dashes

About Standards
Introduction
UNIVERSAL
Middle years and up
expressive punctuation
em dashes
parenthetical dashes
grammar
emphasis
giving examples
interruption
expansion
amplification
description
asides
tangents
Purpose
Use em dashes as a piece of expressive punctuation.
Description
This lesson is an introduction to parenthetical dashes (em dashes). We talk briefly about the differences between three types of dash, and then use a series of snippets from Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle to look at the effects we can create using em dashes in narrative.
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