The em dash took me a while to understand. When I first started writing, all punctuation flummoxed me. One of the first books on the writing craft that helped me understand the basics was Noah Lukeman's A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation.
Here is the basics:
The parentheses and the em dash are similar, but different.
For me, the parentheses can be compared to a quiet stream in which the words of your sentences are interrupted, but the water (meaning) still flows around it.
The em dash interrupts the sentence like a waterfall--its purpose forces the reader to process the information before moving on. In MS Word it is made by stringing two hyphens next to each and the software automatically makes the dashes on line.
At a writing conference when I first met Deborah Halverson--November 2007--she suggested I read Noah Lukeman's A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. I was going to retype his chapter (pages 111 - 138) but that would have taken me too long and might be considered plagiarism.
The hyphen is used in the parentheses to show sequence and the parentheses quietly tells the reader where the info can be found.
Here is Deborah's link for her blog DearEditor.com and read how she explains it:
http://deareditor.com/2010/08/04/re-help-for-em-dashaholics/
In addition to page sequences, the hyphen is used for breaking up words that need to drop to the next line, but that's mostly before justification on computers. The hyphen also connects words like eighteen-year-old or the digits in a phone number.
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