The Trouble with Dashes

I use far too many dashes in my writing.



I'm going through and working on draft #3 of my novel. One of the items which I have to focus on in this draft is cleaning up grammer and punctuation. And unfortunately, that means a lot of my dashes have to go.

It's really quite strange, but I find them quite a natural thing to use. To me they seem to convay a natural speech pattern. The problem is, they don't look nearly so natural on the page. And when one gets a good dozen of them every 250 words or so, one knows one is overdoing it.

So the dashes go out and commas and colons and semi-colons and periods come in. Not nearly as fun, but a good deal more professional.