Writing on Brandon Pugh's Blog

Em Dash Appreciation Society

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Em Dash Appreciation Society

As someone who discovered the em dash fairly late in life, I appreciate this effort to keep it alive.

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The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Elements of Eloquence a book by Mark Forsyth - Bookshop.org US

“Sharp, witty and funny” is the best way to describe this book. Really entertaining while also going deep on lots of literary techniques.

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In praise of the ellipsis

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In praise of the ellipsis

The ellipsis is an irreplaceable method for showing disdain, avoiding the subject, offering a knowing delay, bringing a sense of speech to the page, or just being plain snarky. It allows you to pause and then move on without the need to tell anyone why…

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REA's AI Policy - Room Escape Artist

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

REA’s AI Policy - Room Escape Artist

I’m a fan of escape rooms and I recently discovered this great website dedicated to them. Aside from their regular posts however, I appreciated this recent post detailing in what ways if at all they use AI. It seems like a reasonable approach for an online publication but also speaks to the sad state of the AI slob-riddled internet these days that they have to make a post like this.

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Quickly react to recent message in Slack

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned that you can react to the most recent message just by adding +. So you can type +:thumbsup: as the message it add it as a reaction to the most recent message instead of an individual message.

You can also type ⌘⇧\ or ctrl⇧\ to open the emoji picker on the message.

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Semantic line breaks (one sentence per line)

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just discovered Semantic Line Breaks. I could never decide on exactly how to do line breaks in markdown so I love that someone came up with a convention that’s been thought through.

This led me to discover this post by Derek Sivers: Writing one sentence per line

What’s interesting is that while he’s recommending the same approach, he suggests that it will improve your writing itself.

Nicer git diffs is just a side benefit. 🙂

Definitely going to adopt this now and see how I like it.

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The "Inverted Pyramid" in journalism

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Continue with the writing, Today I learned about the inverted pyramid in journalism:

It’s a way to structure content so that it “begins with the details that readers care about most. As the article progresses, the focus shifts toward details that are relevant only to the most interested readers.”

I came across it in this great post about How to Write Useful Commit Messages but is just as applicable to blog posts/reports/docs/emails.

As a reader this is nice because you can get the info you care about faster and bail at any point.
As an author you reduce the risk that you’ll lose people before you’ve made your main point.

Michael Lynch has a lot of great content on writing for developers and is working on turning it into a book: Refactoring English

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On dashes

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on improving my writing and since it’s an important skill in our industry I figured it’s also a category of learnings worth sharing.

I’ve been experimenting with using em dashes (—) lately but I just learned that it’s common to not put spaces around it.

Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.

I personally think I’ll prefer adding spaces — at least in my own writing — since it looks more distinct from a hyphenated word. I also saw it mentioned somewhere that some software incorrectly teats it as a hyphenated word when double clicking or press and holding for selection. This also makes me realized I may have written some word-counting logic incorrectly in the past 😅

How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-) | Merriam-Webster

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