Hold onto your hamburgers, folks, because I’m about to nerd-out—hard.

I wasn’t always a punctuation nerd. My eighth grade English teacher nearly murdered any love I had for reading or language or writing with the absolutely dreaded, still-to-this-day confounding—wait for it—sentence diagram.

Who else suffered through endless hours of drawing out those m-f’ers?

For all my teacher’s focus on sentence structure, I didn’t learn proper em-dash use in eighth grade. Or high school. Or college. Or law school.

How did I finally find my way around an em-dash? By reading. And not dusty legal journals, but fiction. Even then, I’ve found that many authors don’t use this little gem as much as they could.

Em-dashes are a widely ignored and largely underused piece of punctuation, and it’s a darn shame. Because no other punctuation is so versatile.

It can take the place of a comma, a colon, or parenthesis. It can add a dash of dramatic flair or set important information apart. It can interrupt dialogue.

“I love y—” She started before vomit erupted from her mouth.

The em-dash is to writing what guacamole is to a potluck; it’s the delicious little side that says hey, ya’ll, this is a party.

Now don’t mistake the em-dash (—) for its shorter cousin, the en-dash (–), or the even shorter hyphen (-). If you’re like wtf is up with all these dashes, dude, I can never keep them straight, try thinking of them like Goldilocks and the three bears. Except most of the time, the middle bear’s stuff isn’t “just right.” Bigger is better (no matter what you told your ex-boyfriend). Or in this case, grammatically correct.

Not that en-dashes and hyphens don’t have their place. En-dashes link items connected by time or distance. For example: I just read the May–December issue of 1,001 Useless Things. And hyphens link words that function as a single concept. May-December romances are rare—unless you’re rich.

See what I did at the end there with that em-dash?

Just like eating too much guac gives you a stomach ache, too many em-dashes can bloat your writing. Because too much of a good thing is just…too much.

But sprinkled in judiciously and impactfully? Em-dashes could be just the seasoning your writing needs to give it that spicy, special something. Why don’t you give it a whirl?

What do you think: em-dashes, yay or nay? Share your thoughts in the comments.