Never mind the debate over the future of the regional press and public service broadcasting. The latest issue of Standpoint magazine has tackled an issue which we journalists can really get stuck into.

It’s the dash versus the semi-colon.

Citing an example from the Sunday Telegraph of the increasing use in journalism of the em-dash, Lionel Shriver writes that it is “a punctuation mark that is raging through contemporary prose as rapaciously as clostridium difficile is contaminating our hospitals…The em-dash is eating semicolons for breakfast.”