Test:
'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'
I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?
"There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and, guess what, parentheses are right there for you."
> There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence and realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and guess what? Parentheses are right there for you.
That's what I'd do. Note the conversion of the first comma to "and," as well.
Your first sentence is a perfect example of why emdashes need to exist. The comma is overloaded, since it can be used both as a list separator and for parenthetical asides. But that first sentence starts using them as a list separator, and then inserts a parenthetical aside into the list. Emdash wins this test.
I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer.
I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks like crap with parenthesis, as if the author should have thought of a way to avoid doing that, while with the m-dash there’s no problem at all.
That is a weakness of sorts, but yes, unless one is attempting a particular, niche affect, an urge to nest parenthesis is usually a cue to re-write the sentence instead.
It's a bit like 2 space indention versus 4 or 8 space. I find the em-dash example pretty compelling because visually relaxes my eye more than commas do — similar to how prefer at least 4 space indention over 2.
(Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)
As far as I know, the UK styles that recommend spaced dashes are using en dashes where US English would use em dashes, and the ones that actually use em dashes, like Cambridge or Oxford, are unspaced.
I just thought of the most annoying blog in the world. Individual spacing between words, depending on how thoughtful you want the pause to be. And by "individual" I mean a different floating point number denoted amount of em each. em > em-dashes. Or put differently, em dashes em-dashes.
It's really hard to find style guides on reading specifically.
But what I see from trawling the posts made by narrators, a lot of them do mention that em-dashes are read as interruptions with sudden tonal shift, while cursive implies a non-interuptive tonal shift.
That said, apparently, most audiobook authors actually supplement their own guidance on how to read their books. I haven't found any universal guide yet.
I read the parenthesis as a secondary thought that is there if you want to take in additional context but where the main message can be read just as well without, whereas the em block is a deliberate interruption to call attention to context necessary to understand the main message.
I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?