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When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen?

Is there any difference between:

-

and

-- or in some cases, a long dash

I have seen these two used lots of places but I really don't know the difference.

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The good people at Microsoft Word may have confused authors by setting up auto-correct to replace two sequential dashes with a single em (longer) dash. The intent is to be helpful because the em dash can be quite useful, but does not appear on standard keyboards; but the effect is to confuse many people who fail to spot the non-obvious difference between the short and long dashes.

Stylistically, I believe the convention for using an em dash is to let the writer signal that the thought after the dash is a kind of temporary interruption to the flow of the sentence and its paragraph.

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