Writing coach and CUNY Journalism Press editor Timothy Harper tells us how to properly use ellipses, em dashes, and parentheses. FULL TRANSCRIPT: The default, typically, when we’re using punctuation ...

From Slate: "Dashes — useful and lovely though they are — are not … ellipses. They excel at representing interruptions, trains of thought abruptly shorn off. Meanwhile, an ellipsis trails away ...

As a rule, I prefer to make fun of myself rather than make fun of others, but in my previous column I departed from my usual approach. I poked a little fun at people who use dots and dashes as default ...