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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37429
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37429
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The em dash does not mean pause. There is no piece of punctuation that means pause. The em dash is a more emphatic substitute for the comma, colon, or parentheses and can be used to indicate omitted words. If you need to indicate that someone pauses in speech, say "John paused".

Be particularly aware of trying to act out dialogue -- using punctuation to indicate pauses or italics or bolding to indicates tone of voice. This is not how the medium works. If you need to give the sense of what the character is feeling when they speak, do it through the words they choose, or, better, set it up first so that the reader knows how they feel based on what has come before.

But if you absolutely must indicate that the character paused, write that they paused. Don't rely on the reader intuiting the meaning of your non-standard usage. However clear it seems to you, it will not be clear to all your readers.

That said, if you are using the em dash for its normal function as punctuation, then you should use it as often as is appropriate. No word, no turn of phrase, no punctuation mark is being used too frequently if it is being used appropriately.

That said (again) you might make a case for its use for a case that does not occur outside of dialogue, which is to indicate that the speaker broke off in the middle of a sentence and reformulated what they were saying on the fly. This only occurs in prose dialogue, since in all other forms of writing, the author reformulates the sentence and the reader never sees any evidence of the aborted attempt. But this is a techniques that I think should be used very sparingly -- that empirically is used very sparingly -- and that might better be handled by describing the break in words rather than with punctuation. Again, avoid the temptation to act out. Unless the plot turns on the half-formed sentence and the struggle to rephrase it on the fly, don't go there.

Original score: 8