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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/31775
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm hoping for guidance on several very similar situations, which I suspect are all meant to be punctuated and spaced differently.

### Stuttering

How would you write someone stuttering out the word "you"? Here is my best guess:

> “What do y-y-you want?”

That is, hyphens (not en or em dashes), and no spaces. Is this correct?

### Starting over a sentence

How would you write someone starting over a sentence, i.e. "interrupting themself"? Here is my best guess:

> “That’s— It’s more complicated than that.”

That is, em dash, but add a space _after_ the em dash, since it's kind of functioning like a period. Also, the new sentence is capitalized. Is this correct?

(I'm mostly doubting myself on the space.)

### Repeating yourself

This gets tricky, because this is kind of like a stutter, but also kind of like the last example, so I'm confused:

> “Who—who are the other candidates?”
> 
> _Have to—have to make it worth it._
> 
> “Saying that isn’t legally binding,” she frowned, again, “and it—it’s not that.”

Here I went with em dash, no space, and lowercasing the repeated fragment. What do you think? Do these three examples even belong in the same category?

Original score: 2