ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by "breaks in thought." Our brains were

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in a cast for a month after delivering this one...

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How should you change the below sentence to make it correct, if at all?

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To some of you—my essay may seem good even brilliant.

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Dashes can also be used to emphasize a break in thought, an afterthought, or a clarification.

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So, to figure this one out, we need to identify the natural fault lines in the sentence.

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We can tell right off the bat that (A) is incorrect because, while we generally need

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a pause after an opening prepositional phrase like "To some of you..."

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...putting a dash there brings things to too much of a halt.

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It's kind of like being behind somebody who's just way too cautious at stop signs.

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Choice (B) is even more wonky.

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The dash pops up in the middle of the thought, breaking the sentence up in a way that doesn't make sense.

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It's sort of like a highway that just randomly ends for no reason.

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Well, (C) does get some brownie points from us because it uses a comma to separate the

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prepositional phrase at the beginning of the sentence.

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Before it does a victory dance, though, we have to cross it out for wonky dash use.

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(D) is the one that shows them all how it's done.

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The two modifiers, "good" and "even brilliant," are separate ideas...so they

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need to be separated in some way.

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A comma would also work here, but the dash helps to really emphasize just how good this essay might be.

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Choice (A) shows us how to a break a thought with flair.

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We hope our thoughts never break, but if they do, we'll try to glue them back together with a dash.

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