On the dash

Merrill Perlman:

Garner’s Modern American Usage calls the dash “perhaps the most underused punctuation mark in American writing.”

But — and this is this columnist’s opinion — it’s frequently overused.

On, Dasher! (Columbia Journalism Review)

[This post is for my advanced writing students, who have made the dash — and its potential for overuse — a frequent occasion of fun in the last weeks of a wonderful semester.]