The em dash (—) is considered to be the most flexible punctuation mark. It’s commonly used to express interruption between ideas, show emphasis, or to introduce another thought.
In informal writing, the em dash is usually used in place of commas, parentheses, colons, and semicolons.
MS Word offers several features that you can use to easily insert punctuation marks or symbols in your document.
Of course—this includes the em dash. Follow along with this article to learn the different ways on how you can insert em dash to your documents.

Now, there are three methods you can use to insert an em dash character into a Word document.
3 Ways to Insert an Em Dash in Word Document
- Using the keyboard shortcuts
- Using the Special Characters tab on the Symbol dialog box
- Using the Character Map program
MS Word considers the em dash as a special character. You’ll need to use any of the methods above to successfully insert it into your document. Learn each of these methods so that you will always have alternatives when one of them doesn’t suit your case.
Let’s get started!