In punctuation, all choices pale before the power of the dash. Yes--the dash, whose very name exudes speed and excitement. Often misunderstood, even mistaken for the lowly hyphen, the dash gives us that abrupt--even exhilarating--break from what was then, into the unknown hereafter, even as our heart races and our palms sweat in anticipation. Comparing it to other punctuation is to compare a crown jewel to that lint in our belly buttons.
         Contrast the excitement level of a dash to its mid-sentence rivals . . . the slow, boring ellipsis? The short, inconsequential break of a comma? Or the colon, with its explicit crudity: it raises our expectations only to let us down with banal listings of this, that and whatever. Or the meandering semi-colon; the enemy of all as it spurns readability in its drive for unneeded complexity.
        Even end-of-sentence punctuation pales in comparison to the exalted dash. The blustering exclamation mark, artificially telling, rather than showing, of questionable excitement with ill-advised conceit? The frustrating question mark, drawing us slowly toward answers as we fidget in          

 our impatience, while the dash grabs and hurtles us onward?   
       And let us not speak of the period, that bit of flotsam that brings us to a crashing halt. So let us thrill in the swashbuckling aura of the dash--the Shakespeare of punctuation.
    
    
                       About the Author
     
        Larry Hodges, of Germantown, MD, is an active member of SFWA with 37 short story sales. He's a graduate of the six-week 2006 Odyssey Writers' Workshop, the 2007 Orson Scott Card Literary Boot Camp, and the 2008 Taos Toolbox Writers' Workshop. He's been a full-time writer for many years with three books and over 1200 published articles in 97 different publications. He is also a member of the USA Table Tennis Hall of Fame - Google it! - and once beat someone using an ice cube as a racket.
        Visit him at www.larryhodges.org.
   
                                        Copyright © Larry Hodges