The whole screed-y thing about using too many em-dashes is more properly a screed against people who use too many of them, and doesn't seem to me to touch on the humble horizontal marks at all.
The real thing to go after would be hillbilly emo poets who use ellipses in place of every other bit of punctuation. I think it's in an issue of Highway Evangelist that I found at a truck stop that someone wrote a pathetic poem (in more than one way) about some horribly mistreated child, who of course dies, and every dozen words would have at least two ellipses in them somewhere. The effect was of someone gasping out the words, perhaps racked by spasms of tears, or maybe barfing at the naked bathos of the verses.
no subject
The whole screed-y thing about using too many em-dashes is more properly a screed against people who use too many of them, and doesn't seem to me to touch on the humble horizontal marks at all.
The real thing to go after would be hillbilly emo poets who use ellipses in place of every other bit of punctuation. I think it's in an issue of Highway Evangelist that I found at a truck stop that someone wrote a pathetic poem (in more than one way) about some horribly mistreated child, who of course dies, and every dozen words would have at least two ellipses in them somewhere. The effect was of someone gasping out the words, perhaps racked by spasms of tears, or maybe barfing at the naked bathos of the verses.