Valedico's Poetry Contest: Part I

I don't want to use no stinking dots :)

Well, I wanted to see the ant poem (so I have selfish reason of my own it seems).

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Someone sent this to my pm box, I think it's interesting, so I'll share. It seems I should be using double ''--'' instead?

''DASHES

Parenthetic and other uses at the sentence level:

Like em dashes, en dashes can be used instead of colons, or pairs of commas that mark off a nested clause or phrase. They can also be used around parenthetical expressions--such as this one--in place of the em dashes preferred by some publishers, particularly where short columns are used, since em dashes can look awkward at the end of a line.

Em Dash:

The em dash (--), or m dash, m-rule, etc., often demarcates a parenthetical thought or some similar interpolation, such as the following from Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine:

"At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box--including the gold and silver crayons--and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons."

It is also used to indicate that a sentence is unfinished because the speaker has been interrupted. For example, the em dash is used in the following way in Joseph Heller's Catch-22:

He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was the miracle ingredient Z-147. He was--
"Crazy!" Clevinger interrupted, shrieking. "That's what you are! Crazy!"
"--immense. I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide supraman."

Similarly, it can be used instead of an ellipsis to indicate aposiopesis, the rhetorical device by which a sentence is stopped short not because of interruption but because the speaker is too emotional to continue, such as Darth Vader's line "I sense something, a presence I have not felt since--" in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

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SEMICOLON

The semicolon (;) is a punctuation mark with several uses. The Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder established the practice of using the semicolon mark to separate words of opposed meaning, and to indicate interdependent statements.[1] The earliest, general use of the semicolon in English was in 1591; Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to use them systematically. The modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items, or to the linking of related clauses.

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[From Wikipedia] ''

Well it seems I did some sort of error, Britt. This all confusing. it seems there should be a longer dash and a shorter one? I'm clueless.

I got this...

''Btw, I put the "--" because the keyboard doesn't make a difference between long and short dashes. :) ''

Another something for Janis to do? Oh my.

Well I guess yes, when writing something by hand it wouldn't be the exact size everything, but you can always make long and short ones. and yes, it does that in Microsoft, it blends them.

I thought it was the ''em dash'' up there? O.o

If there is an English teacher round here I bet they must be dying to shoot us.

''well they should be stepping in and telling us the correct answer!''

I think you forgot ''please?'', Britt? XD

I miss high school. oh well. It's sad yes most is lost. I don't even want to think Mathematics!

''Ew, math. Let's not go there. lol''

I think that's something we both agree on! xD

I was taught that -- is the same as one long dash.