Hi,
In screenplay format, a sentence will sometimes end with two dashes like this –
Sometimes those dashes end up on the next line by themselves. Is there a simple way to prevent that?
Write shorter sentences.
Just kidding. If the space between the last word and those dashes is intentional, type ⌥␣ (Option + Space) instead. This produces a “non-breaking space”.
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If the dash represents interrupted speech, there should not be a space between the last word and the dash. Or so I have always believed.
@gr That was also my first reaction (you wouldn’t want to typeset a space there, and certainly not a full-sized one), but… apparently nobody cares in this context.
Here’s what John August (screenwriter, Fountain markup co-inventor, Highland developer) thinks:
“Because every letter takes up the same amount of space, a lot of what looks good in normal typefaces looks wrong in Courier. Traditional typewriters never had ‘real’ dashes, so the convention was to use two hyphens instead, generally set off with a space on either side. That’s what I use: two floating hyphens. Other writers jam two hyphens right at the end of a word …”
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Though it does seem that August is talking about dashes used as phrase markers. For that, in regular typesetting, you might want an m-dash flanked by thin spaces, or an n-dash flanked by regular spaces (Bringhurst). In the plain text Courier world of theatrical scripts, the double-dash flanked by regular spaces seems right for that job.
However, I have the idea (who remembers from where?) that the protocol for interrupted speech is different. And certainly there is at least a clear intuitive reason that the dash (or dashes as the script case may be) at the end of the interrupted incomplete phrase should appear right up against (or no more that thin space away from) the text in that case.
You’re probably right, but I’ve seen all of it in the wild, connected dashes, “floating” dashes, ellipses, three periods… even proper em-dashes (of course not written on a typewriter), all with and without spaces.
We may have unintentionally discovered the sole optional formatting in screenwriting. Whatever the rule is, nobody seems to care. Unusual.
But hey, for the space connoisseurs, the nbsp saves the day.
Your belief is likely unfounded when speaking of ellipses. It’s actually more common to have a space than to not have a space before an ellipsis, at least in the US.
It is more common to not have a space before an em dash. Of course a non-breaking space isn’t going to be any help for that. That’s why we have the Word Joiner. It’s right there in the menu, and using that will keep an em dash from being orphaned from the preceding word. Having it on the next line is honestly pretty ugly.
Typing two dashes on a typewriter was the typewriter trying to make a vain attempt to create an em dash.
That’s an old habit that’s really important to break, because many wordprocessor programs will consider two dashes in a row to be an em dash and make it look like an em dash. I think Scrivener even does that. But in reality it’s still two dashes, and it might still be interpreted as two dashes when that is converted to an actual document.
What confuses the issue is that there is no real standard accepted everywhere. Journalists typically conform to AP, while novelists typically conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. Those two standards don’t always see eye to eye.
But either way, space or no space, is acceptable. What’s important is consistency. Pick a lane.
That’s an old habit that’s really important to break, because many wordprocessor programs will consider two dashes in a row to be an em dash and make it look like an em dash. I think Scrivener even does that. But in reality it’s still two dashes, and it might still be interpreted as two dashes when that is converted to an actual document.
I don’t know about all word processors, but that isn’t what Scrivener does. LibreOffice as well will replace hyphens with the correct punctuation glyph. It uses two different models that match the most common US/UK standards: if you type test--test then you get test—test (em-dash), and if you type test -- test you get test – test (en-dash).
The only automatic conversion it does, when compiling, is the opposite. It will look for typographic punctuation and convert it back to ASCII-friendly, for systems that require that (LaTeX, scriptwriting in many cases, some Markdown conversion engines, programming languages, XML, etc.).
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