Appropriate dash to use when attributing a quotation?

Question

If I’m citing a poem or quotation, what kind of dash precedes the author’s name? Example:

This Business of Printing; which I am heartily tired of, and repent I e’er attempted. . . . 

                                                                                                                                     —John Baskerville

Should this be an em dash, an en dash, or something else?

And should there be a space between the dash and the author’s name?

Answer 1

Given these choices:

U+2010 ‭ ‐  HYPHEN
U+2011 ‭ ‑  NON-BREAKING HYPHEN
U+2012 ‭ ‒  FIGURE DASH
U+2013 ‭ –  EN DASH
U+2014 ‭ —  EM DASH
U+2015 ‭ ―  HORIZONTAL BAR
U+2212 ‭ −  MINUS SIGN
U+2E17 ‭ ⸗  DOUBLE OBLIQUE HYPHEN

The right answer is actually U+2015, whose alternate name is indeed “quotation dash”. Failing that, you are supposed to use U+2014. This is very common in Romance languages, BTW, using a quotation dash for speech quotes.

Note that even Bringhurst, who isn’t a fan of the long em dash, rightly says to use two of them for bibliographical entries. The recently released Unicode 6.1 has given us two more dashes to help with this:

U+2E3A ‭ ⸺  TWO-EM DASH
U+2E3B ‭ ⸻  THREE-EM DASH

Answer 2

I assume the style to which you are adhering, if any, does not prescribe a specific type of dash, and therefore this is a matter of personal preference and aesthetics. I would definitely not use an en-dash; I reserve en-dashes strictly for (usually numerical) ranges. Therefore, I would prefer to use an em-dash. I personally never put spaces around em-dashes—e.g., when using them to enclose a parenthetical phrase—so I would suggest not using a space.

You might get some more answers by cross-posting this question to http://tex.stackexchange.com/ (a StackExchange site dedicated to typesetting).

Edit: I am dismayed to report that it appears as if StackExchange uses an en-dash in comment signatures. This is a grievous error! We should all file bug reports! ;-)

Answer 3

I think the answer to this question comes down to your interpretation of the word "cite." Are you writing an academic paper that requires a certain style (APA, MLA, etc..) or are you just typing up a quotation you really like to put up on the wall? If the latter, it should be fine the way you have it posted here. I don't think there is a standard for personal use, it is just a stylistic choice really. Just do it the way that looks best to you. Otherwise, if its for an academic paper, just "google" the citation style and "poem" and you will get a plethora of info on how to do that.

Answer 4

Please use a dash longer than the normal hyphen to distiguish it from the hyphen between word parts (like in "stand-up") and certainly add a space between dash and name for readability.

Answer 5

One en-dash.

A hyphen is wrong. An em-dash would definitely be wrong. Two en-dashes are never right in any circumstance, though two hyphens can be used to indicate an em-dash when the font does not support extended characters or is monospaced (or you don't know how to produce such a character).