Adam O’Fallon Price writing for The Millions:

Punctuation, largely invisible and insignificant for normal people, as it should be, is a highly personal matter for writers.  Periods, commas, colons, semi-colons:  in their use or non-use and in their order and placement, can represent elaboration, conjecture, doubt, finality.  And in aggregate, over the course of a text, the rhythms of punctuation advance an author’s worldview and personality as surely as any plot or theme.  Patterns of punctuation usage are the writerly equivalent of an athlete’s go-to moves, or a singer’s peculiar timbre and range—those little dots and squiggles, in a sense, encode your voice. For me, there is no punctuation mark as versatile and appealing as the em dash.

There’s nothing more perfect than a well-placed em dash. Followed closely behind by a well-used comma.

Of course, the proper way to use an em dash requires a space both before and after, which Price appears to be mistaken for on occasion.¹ I’ll go easy on him, though.

It’s perfectly coincidental this piece was first linked to by Kyle Dreger at Audacious Fox. His prose is top-notch — one of my favourite writers on the web. Of all people to link to a piece on punctuation, it would be Kyle.

If you’re willing to put up with a site redesign every six weeks or so,² Kyle’s A.F. is well worth an RSS subscription.

I need to work on my sarcasm here. I understand there is a preferred and/or accepted method for putting spaces around em dashes (from what I gather, it’s dependent upon a range of styles). I personally prefer spaces around em dashes. Done. End of story. I didn’t mean to imply no spaces is incorrect. ↩

You’ll want to visit A.F. on a regular basis — Kyle’s design prowess is as palpable as his feel for diction. ↩