I usually see just format in the emails I receive daily:
Hello Dorian--
I'm calling you in regard with the something...
Thanks,
I see comma after the greetings too but I am not sure why double hyphen is being used there. Can someone explain it?
6 Answers
Haha, I don't know what their deal is. After a salutation, use a comma for a personal letter, a colon for a business letter, and either for an email. Dashes are not acceptable.
For example
Dear Mr. Lawrence:
¶ This is an example of a business salutation . . .
Dear Sally,
¶ This is an example of a personal salutation . . .
Dear Kane (,/:)
¶ This is an example of punctuation options in an email salutation . . .
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2I'm not familiar with using a colon for this. I would always use a comma. Is this a US-EN thing? Commented Oct 6, 2012 at 21:03
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@DominicCronin Colons for business salutations are standard for AmE.– StephenSCommented Nov 13, 2021 at 0:23
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Yes, using colon in this way is standard in the United States, but only in the United States. The rest of the English-speaking world does not differentiate business and personal correspondence in this respect, and uses commas in both.– jsw29Commented Nov 14, 2021 at 22:48
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@jsw29 I think you'll find that zero punctuation here is becoming widely accepted. Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 18:46
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1@EdwinAshworth, true, one could say ' . . . uses commas, if it uses any punctuation'. The main point of my comment was to ensure that the future visitors to this page are not confused about the use of colons in salutations, which is a U.S. peculiarity.– jsw29Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 21:21
I don't know why someone would put a double hyphen after the recipient's name in an email, but the Internet has long-standing tradition of the "sigdash". In early email and news software, the convention was adopted that anything below a line containing two dashes and a space, was your signature block.
Most email and news software to this day respects this de facto convention, although, to my knowledge, it never made it into any Internet standard or RFC.
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Correct! I added an answer with more details 10 years later. Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 16:21
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It may not have made it to any "Internet standard" like an IETF RFC, although it has been popular enough that a Wikipeida link does exist which then (redirects to an article section which) mentions the standard: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sig_dashes redirects to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block#Signature_dashes which mentions some software support.– TOOGAMCommented Apr 21, 2023 at 0:13
The "double hyphen" is a stand-in for an em dash (—), which is a punctuation usually used for expressing a pause before a related thought. Some of its functions are redundant with colons, semicolons, and even commas, although using it in place of a comma is typically frowned upon as unnecessary.
What you're dealing with in your greeting is an em dash taking the place of a colon or comma. The distinction is trivial, but to me it suggests a slight hesitation—the meaning of which could convey either an anxiety or something completely neutral.
I don't agree with RedDwight. I think that an em dash at the end of a salutation where you don't use a colon makes sense. A comma at the end of the salutation is either a little wrong or completely wrong but widely "accepted."
For example, "Good morning, someone,"
Why is there a need for a comma at the end? This to me sounds like a complete sentence. A period would be a good choice. The em dash makes it ambiguous, but it definitely makes sense as a "line break" and should be acceptable.
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This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post; instead, provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker. - From Review– JoachimCommented Nov 12, 2021 at 20:02
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I'm not sure who decides whether the people who say it's a little wrong, those who say it's completely wrong, or those who 'accept' a comma at the end of a salutation are the right ones. Commented Nov 13, 2021 at 11:38
A double hyphen is still used on the Internet by some people who either believe it is not possible to produce a typographic en- or em-dash, or do not know how to achieve it. This dates from the time when only ASCII, restricted to 128 characters, was supported. Of course support for multi-byte characters through UTF-8 is standard today, and there is no need for this. However the default spelling preferences of Microsoft Word, for example, still include automatic conversion from -- to —.
That, admittedly, only answers half the question. Why anyone would add two hyphens or an em-dash after a salutation is, well, anyone’s guess. Probably naïve users see this sort of nonsense and copy it because they think it must be standard or trendy. The traditional form in letter writing is, of course, the comma (at least it was when I was at school).
I think the fact that this is an email is important. A double dash is used in old telegraph communications to denote a section break. A common formatting was Receiver -- Message -- Sender.
So, in this case, a "--" at the beginning of the message could be interpreted as the beginning of the body.
It's a bit weird, b/c over time the first part was dropped in email and it became more common to address them like letters (e.g., My dearest X,). However, it is still common to break for signatures in this way, and I receive (and send!) emails with a signature break like this:
--
Josh
Many email clients will recognize that and format signatures accordingly.
If you're curious, there are several signals transmitted that are not printable carachteres (i.e., part of the message), but instead show the formatting of the message. In this case, "--" was transmitted as -...-. meaning long, short short short, long. See wikipedia
Shift + Command + -to get a proper em dash. The real problem is that one uses a comma in the salutation, not an em dash. This belongs on Writers.SE, where they will explain why one should use spaced ellipses . . . not what you have up there.