I confess I have been lazily using far too many commas and 'space hyphen space' when I should use em dashes for sentences that need interconnecting punctuation.

But my past writing has typically been for business—mainly email to one or several recipients—for communicating project options or technical information. I've not ever really written publicly for its own sake or to publish for a purpose.

So in my laziness, I never took the time to find out how to use keyboard shortcuts to quickly insert an em dash into my writing, which I prefer to use in many situations.

That changed today!

After writing this week about how others should take just that one step further each day in solving their tech problems—I spent 5 minutes in a search, committed to memory and hereby resolve to use the glorious em dash, as often as I possibly can, in my future online writing!

• Windows: Ctrl + Alt + Minus (-)

• Mac: Shift + Option + Minus (-)

• Linux: Ctrl + Shift + u > 2014 > Enter

(you can use this key combination for any Unicode character. "U+2014" is em)

Yes, it's a crime against humanity by QWERTY-key minimalists that em-dash did not ever get its own key...