Dashes before comma-legal?

Question

I have just learned the use of dashes; I have a question. Here is a sample text I have written where the bold portion is where my main concern exists. Is it "legal" to place dashes before a comma?

Throughout middle school, I have been proactive with friends and developing friendships with various sorts of individuals. Although I was a very timid and bashful person~~not in class~~, I managed to locate several interesting companions who were quite generous and outgoing persons .

In addition, can someone please quickly scan my two sentences and see if there are any grammatical errors?

Thank you.

Mr Wordy · Accepted Answer

A comma after a dash looks a bit weird to me, and I wouldn't recommend it. It looks, to me, like an old-fashioned style, but I might be just imagining that. Other people may have different views on this. I think "except in class" might be better than "not in class". Here you can either just delete the comma, or keep the comma and rearrange the sentence as: "Although I was -- except in class -- a very timid and bashful person, I managed...".

A couple of other things strike me about your sentences. "Proactive with friends" sounds odd. I think you mean "proactive in my efforts to find friends", but that's not quite what you've said.

You start with "I have been", which implies that you're still at middle school or have left very recently. But then you switch to "I was" and "I managed", which places the events further back in the past. What you've written is not actually wrong, but I mention it in case this wasn't the effect you intended.

"Persons" sounds rather stilted and official. It's almost always better to use "people".

Dashes before comma-legal?

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