@SleepingSilence
Actually, you seem to be mistaking hyphens with em dashes there, are you not?
Hyphens (-) are used to join words but dashes (—) are indeed used for pauses —dramatic or not— in fact they are used for nigh full-stop pauses. And they certainly are valid in inter— interrupted sentences and stammering.
Most people just don't know how to type an em dash, and use the hyphen for everything. cutting them some slack in an non-professional environment doesn't seem too much for me. After all, decorating arcane keyboard shortcuts like Alt+1551 isn't something most people need to do.
Ultimately, em dashes aren't ruled the same rigid grammar as most other punctuation marks. More than anything else they are a stylistic choice. Pushing your style on others, or giving bad advice doesn't seem like a good thing to do to a community of writers.
Take a look at this: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/hyphens-and-dashes/
PS:
en dashes are weird. I don't like to use them, and don't even know how to type that. In any situation they could be useful, I think that a hyphen performes better.
An Em Dash also works in a similar capacity to a semicolon. I think most people who use em dashes work in word processors that turn double dashes (--) into them. On this site they are either underused or overused. Hell, I used to overuse them about two years ago before I started revising my personal style.
1x Like
