Dirtydutch
Monday, July 16th, 2007, 2:25 PM
QUOTE (Shimmering Wang @ Sunday, July 15th, 2007, 9:51 PM)

In colloquial dialog- like we have here- setting "if at all" apart from the previous question is perfectly acceptable, assuming you wish to indicate a second, somewhat related but distinct thought/query. That being said, it should have been:
"How should I go about broaching the subject? If at all?"
Put a question mark after the clause, to indicate that, in addition to how to go about broaching the subject, you also wonder if you should bring it up at all. Plus it ensures that the reader knows your voice is going up at the end of each sentence, which is totally clutch.
This is informal, but fine for our purposes. If you want to be on the safe side, here is the grammatically correct formation:
"How should I go about broaching the subject, if at all?"
I am a college dropout.
Wang
Oh, man, in this post, you used the second worst dashing technique, thus creating the brief confusion that's really Prescriptivism's last standing-leg. Here's a rant about the technique form when I was drinking more:
QUOTE
The hyphen has been co-opted by idiots, and is used in place of the dash.
I don't mean to harp on punctuation, and I understand that it's been more or less pointless when I went off on things that don't really make a difference, like the ellipsis with like twelve dots in it or whatever, but it's unbelievably confusing when people hyphenate two words together thinking it will work as a dash (like say, "Dutch has-among other things-too much time on his hands", as apposed to, “Dutch has--among other things--too much time on his hands). There are a lotta' ways to space the dash (space, hyphen, space probably being my favorite), and this is the worst possible way. I really don't care about it being "incorrect." It's just really confusing. Even if you just make up something new, like... "Dutch has))))among other things)))..." at least that isn't already taken. You can't just steal the hyphen, we need that. It takes five times as long to figure out what the hell is going on.
It's not just message boards, a handful of big-name bloggers do it, and I've seen it in major news papers. I asked some other people if they found it to be confusing. The response was a tad chilling; several people didn't even know what the dash or the hyphen were. People read, see "weird-looking" marks in their day-to-day readings, and either have so little interest that they don't care to look it up, or such horrible comprehension that they don't even notice it.
Also, the EoS is a bit out-dated, don't you think?
Edit: "It's a bad Grammar Jammer," though, almost made me laugh out loud.