Surround.vim is a nifty vim extension that allows you to surround blocks of text with , brackets, braces, and pretty much any arbitrary "surround" character. It supports paragraph and word surround, but I frequently use it in visual mode. I'm playing around with Emacs and wondering if there's something similar; something that will let me highlight a region and then have the marked region (or rectangle) enclosed with braces, brackets or tags.
Maybe wrap-region is what you need.
smartparens is another excellent option if need to wrap something with delimiters, tags, etc.