ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the dash, listed by Hassam as just more feature correlated with the casual style and rapid writing typical of the diary. Writing on diary style has tended to make little distinction between structural effects and style at the level of the sentence. The fragmentary, interrupted narrative that is constructed through an accumulation of individual entries is assumed to require a fragmentary, interrupted style of writing. The dash, like the ampersand, suggests a rapid pace of writing, the name of the mark itself suggesting speed-Woolf herself often writes of "dashing off" a piece of writing. It is a mark that is quick to make, just a dash of the pen across the page, and it permits a looser syntactic interpretation than is permitted by punctuation marks such as the colon, semi-colon, comma, or period, all of which define the relations of one clause to another with more specificity than the dash.
