Famous writers who loved the em dash include Laurence Sterne, Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Heinrich von Kleist and James Joyce, and Jane Austen's drafts are thick with them. What joins these authors is less the mark than what happened to it: printers, editors and even modern transcriptions kept taking their dashes out.
EdCitation publishes this guide, written from the writers' own letters and printings and from the scholars who studied them, all read on 3 October 2026. It accompanies a history of the em dash and our opinion piece, the em dash is not proof of AI, and repeats neither. Our house rules keep the long dash out of every guide, so the quotations below say where a writer's dash falls instead of printing it.
EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work, and we are proud of that: an essay on Dickinson's dashes should be yours to the last mark. What it does is find and check. Find sources turns up the scholarship, Cite a source builds each reference from the publisher's record, and Mechanics QA checks the finished paper's formatting and the slips a spell-checker lets through.
Which famous writers used the em dash?
Seven writers, each with a documented record. The table gives what the dash did for each and what later hands did to it.
| Writer | What the dash did | What happened to it | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759 to 1767) | Pauses, breaks and words left unsaid; Sterne calls a row of stars "this dash" | One online transcription sets his dashes as em dashes, though they vary in length | Wikisource (n.d.) |
| Jane Austen, drafts up to 1817 | Emotional weight in dialogue | In Persuasion (1818), a manuscript dash became a semicolon | Sutherland (2010) |
| Lord Byron, letters of 1813 | Joined clause after clause in his letters | He asked his publisher to find someone to punctuate his poems | Cochran (2012) |
| Heinrich von Kleist, Die Marquise von O.... (1808, 1810) | Stands for the story's central event, never narrated | A Project Gutenberg transcription prints the sentence without it | Kleist (1810); Kleist (2004) |
| Edgar Allan Poe, 1843 and 1848 | A "second thought", in his words | He complained that printers swapped it for semicolons and commas | Poe (1848) |
| Emily Dickinson, poems and letters | Disputed: musical phrasing, the speaking voice, or a habit of her hand | Reader's editions such as James Reeves's 1959 selection set conventional marks in its place | Winther (1979) |
| James Joyce, Dubliners to A Portrait (1914 to 1924) | Opened dialogue in place of quotation marks | Printers and his English publisher removed many; he fought to restore them | Gabler (2024) |
| You, in an essay about them | Whatever your style guide allows | Left as you wrote it: Mechanics QA checks the file and changes nothing | The Mechanics QA page |
How did Laurence Sterne use the dash?
As a performer's pause and, at times, a stand-in for a word he would not print. His dash lengths and compositors are in the history; here is what Sterne said about the mark himself.
"Make this dash"
In volume II, chapter 6, Uncle Toby supposes his sister-in-law does not care to let a man come so near her, and the sentence ends in four asterisks. Leave the gap and it is an aposiopesis, the figure of breaking off; "Take the dash away" and fill it with Backside, and "'tis Bawdy"; write Cover'd-way and it becomes a metaphor (Wikisource, n.d.). The mark on the page is a row of stars, yet Sterne calls it a dash: for him the word named the gap, whatever shape the printer gave it.
German keeps that sense in its name for the mark. Duden (n.d.) defines the Gedankenstrich, literally a thought-stroke, as a horizontal stroke for a pause, an inserted clause, or a word deliberately left out.
What a transcription can flatten
The Wikisource transcription of Tristram Shandy, made from scans of eighteenth-century printings, notes that Sterne's dashes vary in length, judges most of the variation to be the printer's, and sets an em dash unless the context gives a clear reason not to (Wikisource, n.d.). A defensible choice, but a choice: for an essay on Sterne's punctuation, quote a named edition.
Why did Emily Dickinson use dashes?
No one knows. Winther (1979) surveyed the main answers, which fall into three families.
Music, or the speaking voice
Thomas H. Johnson, editor of the 1955 variorum, found no grammatical function in her dashes and heard something closer to a musical beat; Austin Warren and Charles R. Anderson also read them as a kind of musical notation. Edith Wylder, in a 1963 Saturday Review article and her 1971 book The Last Face, argued that they were elocution signs for a level tone, a rise and other inflections, as printed in rhetorical readers then popular in New England, one of them the standard textbook at Amherst Academy in Dickinson's time there (Winther, 1979).
A habit of her hand
Theodora Ward replied that Dickinson used the same marks in her letters, and she, Brita Lindberg-Seyersted and R. W. Franklin noted dashes in household notes, shopping lists and recipes, even added to passages copied from books. Franklin concluded they were part of her handwriting (Winther, 1979). Winther's own view sits between: a habit, perhaps, but in "Exultation is the going" the dash after "Into deep Eternity" suggests something endless that a full stop would close off.
She did care about punctuation. When the Springfield Daily Republican printed "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" with a mark she had not written, she complained the poem was "defeated too of the third line by the punctuation" (Winther, 1979). Her editions since 1890 are in the history.
Did Jane Austen use dashes?
Yes, heavily, in her surviving manuscripts, and where a draft can be set beside the print, many are gone. Kathryn Sutherland, an Oxford textual scholar publicising a new website of Austen's manuscripts in 2010 (Nunberg, 2010), compared the two chapters of Persuasion that survive in Austen's hand with the text printed in 1818, after her death (Sutherland, 2010).
In the manuscript, the line of dialogue "When I yeilded, I thought it was to Duty." is followed by a dash, then "But no Duty could be called in aid here.", then another dash. The 1818 text reads: "When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here." Across the passage, Sutherland finds the contractions, capitals and "storm of dashes" that carried its feeling stripped out for quieter punctuation. She points to William Gifford, who read for the publisher John Murray and complained that parts of the printed Pride and Prejudice were "so pointed as to be unintelligible".
Where the scholars disagree
Nunberg (2010) answered that not a page survives of the manuscripts Austen sent to her publishers, only juvenilia and drafts, so who punctuated the novels cannot be settled: "Nobody knows", in his words. He added that Austen often punctuated for the rhythm of speech, a system that was giving way in her lifetime to punctuation by grammar. Both agree the drafts are full of dashes; they disagree about whose hand cleared them away.
What did Byron and Poe say about the dash?
Byron confessed he could not punctuate, and Poe, decades later, blamed the Byronic poets' excess for the dash's fall from favour and defended it anyway.
Byron's plea for a punctuator
On 26 August 1813, returning a corrected proof of The Giaour, Byron asked his publisher, John Murray, whether he knew "any body who can stop", then, after a dash, "I mean point", and after another, "commas & so forth", for he feared he was "a sad hand at your punctuation" (Cochran, 2012). The plea for a punctuator is itself strung together with dashes. Later that year, telling Murray that his friend Francis Hodgson had "stopped or rather pointed" a revise, Byron added a postscript: "I dont know a comma".
Poe's second thought
Poe (1848) opened an instalment of his "Marginalia" in Graham's Magazine by complaining that printers now routinely set a semicolon or comma for a manuscript's dash. He blamed a backlash against overuse about twenty years before: "The Byronic poets were all dash", and the novelist John Neal had pushed it to "the grossest abuse". The dash, he wrote, "represents a second thought", then set a dash, wrote "an emendation", and noted that he had just shown the mark at work. It stands for "or, to make my meaning more distinct", and so "cannot be dispensed with".
Poe practised what he defended. In the Poe Society's transcription of "The Tell-Tale Heart" as printed in The Pioneer in January 1843, we counted 77 dashes in about 2,170 words, roughly 35 per 1,000 (Poe, 1843): between the rates our opinion piece counted for Tristram Shandy and for Jane Eyre.
What is the dash in Kleist's The Marquise of O...?
It is the dash in which the story's central crime happens. Kleist's novella, first published in 1808 and collected in his Erzählungen of 1810 (Bushell, n.d.), opens with a widowed marquise announcing in the newspapers that she is pregnant without knowing how (Kleist, 1810). During the storming of her father's citadel, a Russian officer rescues her from soldiers and leads her into a wing the fire has not reached, where she faints.
The next sentence, in the 1810 printing (Kleist, 1810, p. 220), begins "Hier", then a dash, then "traf er, da bald darauf ihre erschrockenen Frauen erschienen, Anstalten, einen Arzt zu rufen". In our translation: "Here", a dash, "he took steps, since her frightened women soon appeared, to send for a doctor". The assault happens inside that dash, never narrated; Bushell (n.d.) says the text reduces it to "a mere dash". To present a rendering like ours, see citing your own translation.
The dash a transcription lost
We checked the scan of the 1810 volume at the Bavarian State Library: the dash is there on page 220. Project Gutenberg's transcription of Kleist's selected writings, released in 2004, reads "Hier traf er," with no dash at all (Kleist, 2004). We could not see the 1808 printing in the journal Phöbus, so how it set the line is unconfirmed.
Why did James Joyce use dashes instead of quotation marks?
Because he disliked quotation marks, which he called "perverted commas", and wanted each speech opened with a dash. Gabler (2024), who edited the critical editions of Ulysses, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, traces how the argument went.
- Dubliners, 1914. For Grant Richards's first edition, Joyce asked in vain for dialogue dashes.
- A Portrait in The Egoist, 1914 to 1915. Joyce's manuscript put dashes before, inside and often after each speech; in the early chapters the serial's printers kept only the opening dash.
- The English edition of 1918. Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of The Egoist, marked the printer's copy and, from about the middle of chapter III, removed the dashes inside and at the end of speeches on her own authority.
- Jonathan Cape, 1924. Cape's printers set the book with quotation marks. In a letter of 11 July 1924 Joyce told Weaver they had used "perverted commas" and that he had insisted on their removal (Gabler, 2024).
The mark he rejected has its own story in quotation marks: a history.
How do you quote a writer's dashes in an essay?
Quote from one named edition, exactly as it prints them, and say so when the dash itself is your evidence. In order:
Check what your brief asks. Paste it into EdCitation's free Check your paper, which lists the citation style beside the sentence that names it.
Choose the edition your module sets, and quote its dashes as printed: single, doubled, spaced or closed.
Check any transcription against a scan when a dash carries your argument. The Kleist line above shows why.
Say whose punctuation it is. For Austen, Dickinson and Joyce, a manuscript reading and a printed text can differ; name the one you quote.
Find the scholarship. Find sources, asked for "Joyce dashes dialogue" on 3 October 2026, returned 1,490 results. Fourth was Gabler's 1974 essay on the text of A Portrait, reprinted in the collection used above; third, Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes's 2014 chapter "Punctuated Equilibria and the Exdented Dash"; second, a psychiatry paper whose acronym is DASH-MC. Read before you cite.
Build the reference from the record. From the DOI of Gabler's 2024 collection, Cite a source returned, in MLA 9, from Crossref's record and with no retraction notice:
Gabler, Hans Walter. Genetic Inroads into the Art of James Joyce. Open Book Publishers, 2024, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0325.
Check the list and the file. Paste the finished list into Verify references, free, which marks each entry verified, "check this" or not found. Then run the paper through Mechanics QA.
How can EdCitation help you write about a writer's style?
By checking your paper and leaving every mark in it yours. The stories above are of other hands changing a writer's punctuation; no EdCitation tool writes, rewrites or repunctuates a sentence of your work.
Mechanics QA, the last read before you hand in
Mechanics QA is, in our view, the best tool to run last on a finished file, because it works by rule and changes nothing: no model reads your paper, and each finding names the rule it broke and its fix. It checks font, size, spacing, margins, title page, headings and the reference list against the APA 7 student paper; finds comments, tracked changes, placeholders and template text left in the file; matches each citation to the list and looks each reference up in the publisher's record; and flags figures that disagree between sections and the slips a spell-checker lets through. Its formatting rules are APA 7's, so for an MLA essay its other checks are the ones that apply. It names no check for dashes: those stay your choice and your style guide's.
Upload a Word document or a PDF; findings come back marked where they sit, as must fix or fix and check, and the next run shows what you fixed. Mechanics QA is part of Pro, at $8 a month or $72 a year, and a free account can run three checks a month (pricing). Find sources, across about 300 million published works, and Cite a source, in six styles, need no account at all.
Quick questions
Why did Emily Dickinson use so many dashes?
No one knows. Scholars have read them as musical phrasing, as elocution marks like those in the rhetorical readers of her day, or as a habit of her handwriting, since she used them in letters and recipes too (Winther, 1979).
What did Edgar Allan Poe say about the dash?
In his 1848 "Marginalia", Poe said the dash marks a second thought and stands for "or, to make my meaning more distinct", and that printers were wrong to replace it.
Why did James Joyce use dashes for dialogue?
He disliked quotation marks, which he called "perverted commas", and wanted each speech to open with a dash; printers and his English publisher removed many of them (Gabler, 2024).
What happens in the dash in The Marquise of O...?
The story's central event, the assault on the unconscious Marquise, happens inside a single dash after the word "Hier" and is never narrated.
Can EdCitation check the dashes in my essay?
No, and it never changes your punctuation. EdCitation's Mechanics QA, in Pro, checks formatting, leftovers in the file, citations, numbers and language slips; dashes are not among its named checks.
References
- Bushell, A. (n.d.). The Marquise of O (Die Marquise von O) by Heinrich von Kleist, 1810. In Reference guide to short fiction. Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/marquise-o-die-marquise-von-o-heinrich-von-kleist-1810
- Cochran, P. (Ed.). (2012). Byron's correspondence with John Murray, 1: 1811–1816 [Work in progress]. https://petercochran.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/byron-and-murray-1811-18162.pdf
- Duden. (n.d.). Gedankenstrich [Dash]. https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Gedankenstrich
- Gabler, H. W. (2024). Genetic inroads into the art of James Joyce. Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0325
- Kleist, H. von. (1810). Erzählungen [Stories] (Vol. 1). Realschulbuchhandlung. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00013537?page=227
- Kleist, H. von. (2004). Ausgewählte Schriften [Selected writings]. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6645
- Nunberg, G. (2010, November 17). Jane Austen: Missing the points. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2782
- Poe, E. A. (1843, January). The tell-tale heart. The Pioneer, 1(1), 29–31. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/thearta.htm
- Poe, E. A. (1848, February). Marginalia [part XI]. Graham's Magazine, 32(2), 130–131. https://www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar0248.htm
- Sutherland, K. (2010, November 29). "Austen's points": Kathryn Sutherland responds [Guest post]. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2811
- Wikisource. (n.d.). The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman [Transcription]. Retrieved 3 October 2026, from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy,_Gentleman
- Winther, P. (1979). On editing Emily Dickinson. American Studies in Scandinavia, 11, 25–40. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/assc/article/download/1617/1647/5739