Tech billionaire Elon Musk has opinions on everything from space travel to artificial intelligence. His latest target? English punctuation. Musk sparked a heated, if niche, debate by calling for spaces around the versatile em dash.
The Critique Heard 'Round the Internet
In a recent post on
his social media platform, X, Elon Musk weighed in on a sentence's structure, arguing that the rules of English should be changed. His point of contention was the em dash—the long dash used to set off parenthetical phrases—which he believes is often used without spaces, making it look too much like a hyphenated word. 'The rules of English need to change to put spaces between the em dashes', he wrote, adding that he found the mark 'unpleasantly long' and preferred the shorter en dash. The comment immediately tapped into a long-simmering debate among writers, editors, and grammar enthusiasts, proving that even the smallest of punctuation marks can inspire passionate opinions.
Team Spaced Dash: The AP Style
Musk is not alone in his preference. His argument aligns perfectly with the guidelines of the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, the manual used by most newspapers and journalistic outlets. AP style explicitly calls for a space on both sides of an em dash. The logic behind this is primarily about readability, especially in the narrow columns of a newspaper. The spaces create a clear visual break, preventing the words from running together and ensuring the parenthetical thought is distinctly set apart. Proponents argue that the 'open' style — with spaces — enhances scannability and prevents the em dash from being mistaken for a hyphen at a glance, a point Musk himself made. For journalists and online writers who prioritize clarity and quick comprehension, the spaced dash is often the standard.
Team Closed Dash: The Chicago Style
On the other side of the aisle are the purists who follow The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), the bible for book publishing and most academic writing. CMOS, along with other guides like MLA, advocates for a 'closed' em dash—with no spaces on either side. From this perspective, the em dash is a single, powerful piece of punctuation that creates its own space and emphasis. Adding spaces is seen as typographically clumsy, creating an unsightly gap in the text that disrupts the flow of the sentence. The historical basis for the em dash, whose name comes from it being the width of a capital letter 'M' in old typesetting, supports the idea of it as a solid connector, not a floating one. For many book designers and editors, the closed dash is simply more elegant and professional.
So Who Is Actually Right?
The simple, and perhaps frustrating, answer is that neither side is definitively 'right'. The debate over spacing em dashes is a matter of style, not a grammatical rule set in stone. The correct usage depends entirely on the style guide one is following. If you're writing for a newspaper, you'll likely use spaces. If you're writing a novel or an academic paper, you probably won't. The decision is less about correctness and more about consistency and audience. The split highlights how English has different 'dialects' of style for different media. The key, as any editor will tell you, is to pick one style and stick with it throughout a document.
Punctuation in the Digital Age
Musk's comment, and the ensuing discussion, also sheds light on how technology shapes language. The em dash itself, which has roots stretching back to the 15th and 16th centuries, fell out of common use with typewriters that lacked a dedicated key, leading to the double--hyphen '--' convention. Modern word processors that auto--convert double hyphens brought it back. More recently, the mark's reputation has taken a strange turn, with some associating its overuse with AI--generated text, as large language models were trained on data rich with formal writing. This has led some writers to avoid it altogether. Musk's desire to 'change the rules' for readability reflects a modern sensibility where clarity on screens often trumps centuries--old typographic traditions.
