Punctuation and Found Editing Error.

In doing my reading this week for all my classes I found an interesting example of an editing error I wanted to share with you guys. In the text “Writing and Reporting for Media”, for Dr. Normans class, on page 15, four lines down, none of the words have a space between them. I know a few people in this class are also in my Writing and Reporting class check out your book! Now, I know spacing isn’t exactly punctuation. However, if you notice, in that same sentence that has the spacing error, the authors also use two dashes instead of commas. I would argue that this is an example of the over used dash by journalist as our text mentions. 

As the resident English major among all my friends and family, I was feeling very confident when I took the punctuation test. After all, I have looked over and edited hundreds of papers in the last six years.  Boy was I mistaken. One question really confused me – His 3s look like 8s.  Is 3s possessive or is it like a year with no apostrophe? I thought I knew all about apostrophes; they are for contractions and possessives only. I enjoyed refreshing my memory on the subject.  Another section of the text I enjoyed was quotation marks. One of my biggest pet peeves has always been “quotation marks” around words to add “emphasis” so I particularly enjoyed that part of the text.  Finally, a part that really blew my mind was the dash. I guess I could be called “a purist” as the book says, as I have told friends and family several times never to use a dash in academic writing. My 8^th grade English teacher would have thrown a book at me if I ever did! I was taught and trained that a dash is just a confused comma --- so I was shocked to see if have a place in our text (see what I did there?).