i newspaper, October 30, 2024
Dashes are used too frequently and often wrongly, as here. They should be used only for a surprising twist to a sentence, such as ‘Jason Bugby is three months old – but he is already a member of Mensa’, or to enclose something which does not fit into the main subject matter of the sentence, such as ‘Despite spending so much time abroad – last year he was in England for only two months – Lord Freeman maintains a fully staffed house in Hertfordshire’. In this case I would have put: ‘Patrick Fitzsimmons, owner of a north London pub, the Faltering Fullback . . .’ so that the reader does not need to wonder for a millisecond what on earth the Faltering Fullback is. In most cases dashes can be replaced by commas or even deleted.