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Peaceblinkfriend Posted 8 years ago
Grammar

"I will pray for you about that -- building a good reading habit."

Hi all

"I will pray for you about that -- building a good reading habit."

I am wondering if this is a correct use of the em dash.

Thank you.

Best wishes
PBF

  

Top answer

Seems OK to me. Two things, though: 1. When you render speech within quotation marks, pretty much anything goes that will make the right sound in the reader's mind.

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3 Answers
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Seems OK to me. Two things, though:

1. When you render speech within quotation marks, pretty much anything goes that will make the right sound in the reader's mind. The rules out in the text are more stringent. I say that because it is easy to get addicted to em dashes. It is often better to find another way to write a thing, with words instead of punctuation.

2. You can probably m

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If "I will pray for you about building a good reading habit" is accepted as correct, yes — although you have not actually typed an em dash, as I suppose you know.

I have slight reservations about the idea of "praying for someone about building a good reading habit". For one thing, "a good reading habit" seems to me a rather mundane thing to be the subject of a prayer. I guess opinions ma

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My feeling about such dashes is that they often indicate that the writer is leaving it up to the reader to figure out what the writer means. This can be annoying.