Em Dashes, Colons and Semicolons

Making your writing more rhythmic.

I wrote a lot when I was a kid: stories about monsters, heroes, proto fanfic. I even copied stories from comic books, fleshing out the text with my own description of whatever the artwork depicted. Kind of a weird exercise, but I imagine it helped build my skills to translate images to words.

Like most teenagers with a lot of angst, I discovered poetry in high school and—also like most teenagers—I got interested in making music and segued from poetry into lyrics. A lot of kids make the shift, but don't realize what a fundamental effect it will have on how they write—assuming they continue to write into adulthood and to branch into prose and even novels.

Rhythm is inherent in poetry; and not just classical forms that impose a rigid structure. When we write a poem, even if it doesn't rhyme and even if we don't know about meter and stress (free verse), we still choose words that sound good together. Musical, even. Obviously, if you're writing lyrics for music, rhythm is crucial. You don't usually just rant arhythmically while the music is doing something else entirely: the tempo and structure of the music drive the words, even the word choices, the length of lines, where consonants sound good and where vowels can be stretched to create a mood. Lyrics are all about rhythm and words.

If you write lyrics long enough, you start to get a feel for the rhythm of language separate and apart from music. It becomes second nature. Sentences just feel wrong when the rhythm is off. You can read through a paragraph a dozen times, the writing is fine, elegant even, the word choice is great, but something just isn't clicking. Then you realize it's the rhythm that's off. There's a period at the end of a sentence. The subsequent sentence sort of continues the thought. Why did we decide to short-circuit that sentence and cut off what it was trying to say? There's got to be a better way.

This is how I learned to love em dashes, colons and semicolons. These are the primary means of controlling the rhythm of sentences and orchestrating the rhythm of whole paragraphs and chapters (I feel like commas and periods serve a structural and thematic, rather than strictly rhythmic purpose). Punctuation—these "big three" in particular—serve analogous purposes in writing that notes and rests play in music. It's a big part of defining how your writing sounds. Used well, they can make your writing much richer and more complex.

I see semicolons as a sort of rest: a pause to augment the previous idea or to present a contrasting idea without breaking the reader out of it with a period or clumsily joining them with commas or conjunctions. Colons I use to elaborate on an idea. Em dashes are sort of like syncopation: throw the reader off a little, but in a controlled, pleasurable way (even if the nature of that pleasure is agitation or stress). But they all have the property of introducing a visual cue that the reader should adjust their rhythm. The music goes soft for a second, or there's a pause, and a theme repeats.

I'm sure my writing would rub some people the wrong way. I will defer to editors in most cases if I'm really going overboard with my em dash/semicolon/colon structures, but I really love the effect they have on the flow of the words. You'll start to see patterns in your use of punctuation if you expand your usage beyond commas and periods (or question marks, exclamation points or even interrobangs). These patterns become a hallmark of your style, a fingerprint identifying any work as uniquely yours, in the same way fans of specific instruments can identify players by their style, rhythm and dynamics.

If you're making your first forays into prose, especially short stories or novel-length works, you could do worse than to read up on the purpose and function of these rhythmic elements of writing and try to incorporate them into your work. They can add some much-needed color (to mix metaphors) and engage the reader in the same way really great music pulls in listeners, and make for writings that readers remember for a long time after, like a favorite song.