The ?? ?????? ??????? ???????? ?? ???????2020 Democratic presidential candidates — bless their hearts — have a real affinity for a particular type of punctuation. And no — it's not the semicolon.
It makes sense that politicians seeking the presidency would be so into the em dash: It's sleek, long, and powerful, inevitably connoting importance and urgency. On Twitter, candidates want voters to know they're serious about the issues — so serious, in fact, that they're willing to use the punchiest piece of punctuation to talk about them.
It should be noted that I am not against the em dash. In fact, I love to use it, particularly because I finally learned the keyboard shortcut a few weeks ago. Sometimes an em dash simply enhances a piece's voice in a way that a comma, period, or colon can't. (We don't speak in perfect prose; sometimes we speak in strings of asides. In some cases, that approach works better for writing, too.) Despite the em dash's controversial reputation, you'd be hard-pressed to find a writer who neverpulls one out from time to time.
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Unfortunately — and I really hate to say it — the candidates' em dash use on Twitter has reached epidemic levels.
Too much of anything lessens its punch. Reese's pumpkins wouldn't be so beloved if they were available all year, and even the most delightful bop becomes less dazzling when it saturates the airwaves and moves into Old Navy commercial territory. Such is the reality of em dashes: They're meant to be used judiciously, not every time you need to make a point.
Some candidates are worse offenders than others. Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, for instance, seem mostly to save them for real moments of emphasis. Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang, who use hyphens instead, do not appear to know what they are at all. But pretty much everyone else is throwing them around like F-bombs in an episode of Succession. Here are some examples.
Beto's campaign, which is perhaps the field's biggest em dash fanatic, should probably have just started a new sentence here.
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Great video, but seems like a weird time for an em dash!
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Did we need two, Joseph?
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This is absolutely a time for a colon.
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Just start a new sentence!
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To be fair, this linguistic choice makes sense for the candidates, correct usage notwithstanding. (If we're being honest, everyone ignores the rules anyway.) First, the trend is noticeable among many politicians, not just presidential candidates. Check out, for example, the unnecessary em dash in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's flu shot tweet.
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Second, when sentences with em dashes are read out loud, they tend to render the writing more emphatic, more dynamic — both qualities that are often useful to a presidential candidate's image as a speaker and thinker. They read like pregnant pauses, giving the phrases on both sides of the mark more heft, making them seem less like one of a thousand tweets and more like quotes from a great speech. In a story about em dashes from the New York Times, Semicolon author Cecelia Watson is quoted as sayingthe em dash has an "urgency to it, almost like a little arrow that's missing its arrowhead."
"It has that businessy but also breezy look to it," she continues. "Nobody really gets intimidated by a dash.” Businesslike, approachable, academic but also cavalier enough not to turn anyone off ... sounds like a political branding strategy, no?
Of course, you should not be making your political decisions based on em dashes. If that's your dealbreaker, we have bigger things to discuss than Cory Booker's social media team's aversion to colons. Still, Beto. You have to chill on the em dashes, dude — it's the best thing for America.