Hello Old Hack,
Thanks for the warm welcome
. To be honest, the question of proper use of em-dash/en-dash should be asked to a writer or an editor. I only do formatting of documents, making their manuscript into a book format complete with all the elements like Table of Contents, running header, page numbers, Chapter title, Chapter by Chapter layout of body text, dedication, footnotes,
Cover design, setting of proper margins, spine, etc. I also do not edit my clients book, I told them that every time they submit their manuscript to me for formatting, it should be a clean manuscript because I will not do any editing except for the obvious like wrong spellings.
So my answer to your question is I am not also really familiar of the proper use of these dashes.
My bold. You do cover design? Do you have a design background? Could you please give us links to some of the cover designs you've done? I've seen so many self-published books with really dire covers, and they're such an important part of selling well.
Now, onto your other comments. I am an editor. I've worked for some of the biggest publishers in the business, and some of the smallest, and I still get caught out by the correct use of dashes: what I was always advised by the editorial directors I worked with (I was an acquisitions editor) was to use just one sort of dash consistently throughout the book and then alert the book's typesetter to the problem, for them to deal with. I have always been told that making sure the correct dashes were used is a typesetting issue. Which is why I asked you about it, because in your first post in this thread you described yourself thus:
Hello my name is Jeny. I have replied to a few post already before making this introduction. I am not an author, not into writing either but my background is into typesetting/formatting.
Again, my bold.
If you don't know how dashes should be used then you should not imply that you have any working knowledge of typesetting.
This, coupled with
your suggestion in another thread that writers should use Adobe InDesign to format their manuscripts makes me very concerned that you're offering paid-for typesetting and formatting services because it appears that you don't have the knowledge or skills required.
How many books have you worked on? What experience do you have which qualifies you to do this work? What are your charges? None of this is explained on your website, and it should be.
Here's a little test. Can you answer these basic questions
without looking these terms up, and can you explain how you use these things to make the books you work on extra-special?
- What is "kerning"?
- What is "leading"?
- How are points and picas related?
These are really basic things that you need to understand if you're working on the layout of a book. If you don't know what they are without looking them up then I suspect, with all due respect, that you don't realise how complicated a subject this is, and that you don't realise how much you're getting wrong when you do it. So when you offer to do these things for other people in return for money, you don't realise that you're cheating them.
I've read a few pages on your website: it's both confused and confusing, and the writing there makes me even more concerned.
This article, for example, makes so many basic mistakes and is so very flawed in both logic and grammar that I can't work out what point you were trying to make when you wrote it.
I do hope I haven't offended you: I really don't want to upset you. It's just that I am enormously protective towards writers in general, and towards AW's members in particular, and I like to see them getting the best possible help and advice, so I'm acting like a stern head teacher here to make sure that you, and anyone else who reads this thread, understand exactly what the problems here are and how they might be resolved. I hope you stride back into this thread and provide detailed, witty and informative answers to my questions, so that everyone here will be assured that you're up to speed on your own subject and I end up looking like a great big meanie.
