Follow the steps below to add special characters to Microsoft Word documents:
- On the Insert tab, go to Symbols > (down arrow) > Symbol > (down arrow) > More Symbols. (We’ll use the em, or longest, dash as our example symbol.)
- The Symbol dialog box will appear. In the General Punctuation subset, select the em dash to the immediate left of the horizontal bar.
- Insert the em dash and close the dialog box. Congratulations—you’re done!
Tip: After you’ve used the em dash (or some other symbol), it will appear among your recently used symbols. To access them:
- On the Insert tab, go to Symbols > (down arrow) > Symbol > (down arrow).
- Click on a symbol to insert it.
Note: Em and en dashes may look similar, but they do different things.
- Em dashes indicate strong breaks in thought.
Example: Automated spell-checkers work well most of the time—but not always.
- Em dashes also replace pairs of commas or parentheses.
Example: These tools often miss—and sometimes even introduce—major errors.
- En (medium-length) dashes indicate ranges—e.g., “The website should contain 6–10 pages.”
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