I've seen people who use dashes in their writing and they all seem to do it differently.

What in the rainbow are dashes for and what is their proper grammatical form?

We've discussed this somewhat extensively quite recently in later posts in this thread, which reached the limits of my knowledge rather quickly. So while I now there's more to be said on the topic (and so a separate thread is probably a good idea), I doubt I'm the one to say it.