For a speaker/listener, yes.
But for a reader, it has additional value.
I don’t remember where I first read em dashes, but there were times when I felt like something didn’t quite match any of the others I usually use [1] and ended up with a feeling that putting a dash over there made sense.
I also didn’t know the terminologies for these different kinds of dashes, when I started using them.
parentheses, colons (inline or list-starters), semicolons ↩︎
em dashes, en dashes, and commas have different meanings and uses
aren’t all of them “do a short pause”?
For a speaker/listener, yes. But for a reader, it has additional value.
I don’t remember where I first read em dashes, but there were times when I felt like something didn’t quite match any of the others I usually use [1] and ended up with a feeling that putting a dash over there made sense.
I also didn’t know the terminologies for these different kinds of dashes, when I started using them.
parentheses, colons (inline or list-starters), semicolons ↩︎
no.