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The dash is a fabulous piece of punctuation for marketing copy.
You'll find that a dash forgives less than perfect grammar – and it helps you make two points in a single sentence.
The dash above is slightly longer than a hyphen. It's actually an 'en dash' which you can create in Word by hitting two hyphens in a row between words.
Dashes are informal punctuation. They usually go where a colon or semicolon would go (as above) or they can act a bit like brackets :
Nobody – and I mean nobody – should have to put up with that.
This example should actually use an even longer dash, called the 'em dash', but life's too short to be that up tight. Note the similarity with commas. If you remove the section between the dashes, you are left with a workable sentence.
If you get overexcited at the prospect and find you want to use more than one or two sentences on a page with dashes in them, you'll need to make some changes to ad variety. Try using a colon as one variant. And starting a sentence with 'and' or 'but' has some similarities in terms of formality and the implication of one idea following on from another.
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