Ben Dolnick on Our Long Parenthetical Moment

Ben Dolnick, in a delightful piece for the NYT:

Here’s something I used to think about, back in the before-times: A clause set off by em dashes is like dropping underwater while swimming breaststroke — just a quick dip before popping back to the sentence’s surface. A parenthetical clause is more like diving down to the pool bottom to pick up a coin. And a footnote is a full-blown scuba dive — you have strapped on equipment and left the surface behind and you had better, after going to all that trouble, see something interesting down there.

How was it that I had never noticed that this entire taxonomic system of authorial interruptions took for granted that readers would enjoy being plunged into a medium in which they couldn’t take a breath?

Simultaneously an astute observation on writing and a spot-on assessment of our collective moment.

★ Tuesday, 7 July 2020