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Comment by ryukoposting | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. They also use em dashes to repeat a word with emphasis, something that is done much better with parentheses and italics.

> And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause.

> And also occasionally (occasionally) one just needs a random dramatic pause.

I know which one I'd rather read. Though, frankly, I'd prefer neither and I'm trying to remove this kind of thing from my own writing.

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I can't be the only one that reads those two examples very differently.

In a first example, the second "occasionally" is stressed, when in second example it feels almost whispered.

It's really hard to find style guides on reading specifically.

But what I see from trawling the posts made by narrators, a lot of them do mention that em-dashes are read as interruptions with sudden tonal shift, while cursive implies a non-interuptive tonal shift.

That said, apparently, most audiobook authors actually supplement their own guidance on how to read their books. I haven't found any universal guide yet.

Interesting, I read both as emphasized. To me, the parens make the voice clear but the em dashes make it read like a typo.

I read the parenthesis as a secondary thought that is there if you want to take in additional context but where the main message can be read just as well without, whereas the em block is a deliberate interruption to call attention to context necessary to understand the main message.

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