I have always wondered how properly to apply asides to a sentence. Usually, I would simply add parentheses, but that always seemed to break the flow of the sentence too much, so I finally googled hyphenated asides.

Here is a link to an explanation for how to use hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

aap.org.au/Resources/Documents/AJP/A4_PDF/Dashes_and_Hyphens-A4.pdf

It would seem that the difference between parenthetical asides and em dash asides is that the latter relates more closely to what is being said, while former may be only marginally related. I'm looking into it further. Avoid comma asides though. Commas have enough work as it is.

...but I like using commas for my parentheticals.
I have always had a severe aversion for parentheses and dashes in fiction; they always seemed to break immersion and allow an authorial voice to come through. Do you think different narration POVs can have a role in determining which kind of punctuation is most appropriate? I would suspect that even the "character" of the narrator (disinterested, passionate, 3rd person limited, etc) could determined whether that "person" (the narrator) would be more properly conveyed with parentheses or dashes.

Good to know the difference between a hyphen and a dash, though. I never caught the distinction.

Well, think about it terms of a character saying something within the story itself.

"I told Wendell to carry the box--by this point, Gill had lost his arm--but he protested that he was too weak."

The interjections do help display speaking style in that regard, since you want them there. It also helps if you want a movement, but don't want to break the flow of dialogue by closing quotes.

"And let it be known if any treachery is found among your ranks (he regarded Drake with suspicion) it will be left to die among the blood trees."

It can be hard to apply those well though. I did use it to convey a certain narrative point of view in my last story.

"Their friendship was widely spoken of. It was even speculated--and I heard it from a very reliable source--that the princess had stolen his heart."

In that case, the narrative is applying a sort of spoken backdrop to how such news would have traveled, so the occasional aside can help set the tone.

I guess except when a sentence is so small and straightforward that it would complicate it to use a more unusual punctuation, like 'I am Margaret, Maggie for short', or 'All of them present, except the Bolshevists, had dyed their hair red'?

That .pdf is great. Thank you for linking to it.

For the first, I would use a semicolon or a dash just because oh the feel of the sentence. "I am Margaret" has a certain finality to it so that "Maggie, for short" feels like a separate idea. By contrast, "All of them present, except the Bolshevists" is qualifying the first half of the sentence. The clause is not independent. It would read naturally as "All of them except the Bolshevists" if you were dropping the action. That is were a comma is useful. If the sentence read "All of them present had dyed their hair red--except the Bolshevists, who had chosen teal." then we would have a fully separate subject predicate that could easily function as it's own sentence if you had chosen to arrange it differently.

The thing is, there isn't any way to describe an action in the middle of a bit of dialogue without closing and reopening the quotation, without at least severely bending the rules of grammar. That example, for instance, has the speaker saying "he regarded Drake with suspicion" as a parenthetical statement. In academic writing, or other contexts like that, you could use square brackets to interject a statement (like "sic" after a mistake in the original you don't want your reader to think you made), but I don't think I've ever seen them used in fiction.

Further, you can't have something happen "on camera" in the middle of dialogue without "breaking the flow of dialogue." (Unless you want to depict the event solely through the characters' verbal reactions to it.) The most natural way of punctuating your example, to my eye, is as follows:

"And let it be known if any treachery is found among your ranks---" He regarded Drake with suspicion. "---it will be left to die among the blood trees."

(I'd have to think carefully about whether to capitalize the sentence in the middle, and some other points, because I use this so rarely it doesn't look quite right no matter which way I do it. And I personally would have written in a way that avoids this entirely, putting the action before or after the dialogue or between complete sentences of the dialogue if I can't make the "action" include the speech verb. But that's a stylistic thing.)


The point here is essentially correct, but I was at first a little confused, because to me "All of them, except the Bolshevists, had dyed their hair red" is composed of two or perhaps three clauses: "All of them had dyed their hair red" (or perhaps "All of them" and "had dyed their hair red," and "except the Bolshevists".


I find that which punctuation the author uses has far less to do with whether immersion is broken than for what purpose the author uses the punctuation. (I've even managed to stay immersed in fanfiction where the author uses three or four different sets of symbols to delimit dialogue in French, characters' thoughts, telepathy, etc.) If the author interrupts the story with an aside that doesn't fit the story, it doesn't matter if this is done with commas, parentheses, brackets, or dashes, or if it's a whole sentence. On the other hand, the example Lady Kitra gave



fits perfectly into a Regency-influenced tone.