Emphasis through structure

To emphasize something in writing, many lawyers resort to typographical gimmicks: italics, bold, underlining, all capital letters, or some combination of these. To de-emphasize something, many lawyers either bury it in a footnote or, worse, omit it completely, hoping that if ignored, the thing will just go away.

There is a better way. Actually there are many better ways. In To Go Boldly Without Bold, Dr. Benjamin R. Opipari describes several more sophisticated ways to emphasize or de-emphasize things. His lessons are similar to those taught by Dr. George D. Gopen; they involve understanding the reader’s expectations about the structure of sentences and paragraphs, and using various techniques to either meet those expecations or (every now and then) to upset them.

One thing I learned from Dr. Opipari’s article is not to overuse the em-dash. He recommends using the em-dash sparingly, “to destroy the natural direction of the sentence, to forcefully move it in another direction so that what comes after is a sudden shift in meaning and a surprise to the reader. In other words, the dash should break the readers’ expectations of what they thought was coming. Dashes at the end of a clause should reveal something surprising, ironic, or shocking.” He suggests that “[t]he writer who uses five or six dashes on a page for any reason forfeits any expectation of surprise.”

I’m not sure that em-dashes should be restricted to the degree that Dr. Opipari suggests. Bryan Garner, for one, calls the em-dash “the second most underused mark of punctuation” in legal writing, and recommends using it to “clarify a sentence that is clogged up with commas.”¹ Still, I must acknowledge my own overuse of the em-dash to create emphasis, probably because it’s too easy: much easier than restructuring a sentence or a paragraph. So my personal short-term resolution is not to banish the em-dash, but to use it no more than once per page.
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¹ Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 715 (2d ed. 1995).