Any transcriptionist who has ever transcribed an interview knows that people simply do not speak in grammatically perfect, neatly punctuated sentences. My early experience of transcribing was typing legal documents for an attorney. He usually spoke in continuous, logical sentences going from Point A to Point B. But when I changed jobs and began transcribing interviews, I found that people often interrupted themselves to go to a new topic or to return to a previous topic. I quickly learned to use the en dash to indicate a break in a sentence that cannot be handled by any other kind of punctuation. As a transcriptionist, I do not know how I would cope without the en dash. It may just be the most valuable piece of punctuation available for transcribing interviews.