I Heart the Dash-- Ruth

Ruth, an intuitive grammarian, had trouble coalescing what she learned from Ch. 9. A red pencil, a pile of crossed out sentences, a few beads of sweat upon her brow—the detritus of a grammar exercise.

Old:
In contrast to male bodies, the female body seeps, weeps, often overflowing its container. It is both an open void that can be penetrated and a dangerous boundarilessness which threatens to engulf everything.

New:
The female body, in contrast to the male body, often overflows its container. Both an open void capable of being penetrated and a dangerous boundarilessness—the female body threatens to engulf everything.

Notes:
Picking up one of Kolln’s earlier points about using sentence subject placement effectively, I revised the first sentence to place the female body as the primary subject rather than the male body. It seems entirely appropriate in a paper discussing the feminist grotesque that the female body would be the focal subject.

Though Kolln did not discuss the proliferation of useless verbs in Ch. 9, she did make a similar point about the proliferation of modifier nouns. In the spirit of this injunction, I cut seeps and weeps seeing as the verb “overflowing” captures both of these ideas. This makes this sentence much tighter to read.

Though I am a big lover of the dash, I most often use it in pairs to offset information in the middle of a sentence. I decided I’d experiment with using the dash to offset a sentence appositive. I didn’t actually realize that the end of this sentence “engulfs” the meaning of the first part of the sentence, but I believe it does. Off-setting with a dash served to greatly emphasize the female body’s power of permeability.