Hyphen and Dash

1. The incredible, inedible Hyphen and Dash

2. Hyphen - • The hyphen is the minus sign on the keyboard. • Connects words or parts of words to create compound words • Compound adjectives (eco-friendly company, first-year seminar) • Compound nouns (mother-in-law, course-load). • Numbers written out (twenty-one gun salute) • Compound words sometimes lose their hyphen (gameplay, screenshot, workload, lowlife). This last year, 16,000 words or expressions lost their hyphen in the OED. • Alas, video game is still two words, not hyphented.

3. Em-dash — • The em-dash, often just called the dash, is a special character that your word processor will automatically create when you put two hyphens together right next to two words. You can also create it using ALT+0151 • Connects sentences or phrases • My dreams were dashed upon the rocks—I could not go on.

4. En-dash – • The oft forgotten en-dash is dash’s little brother. It is a special character that your word processor creates when you use two hyphens together when there is a space between the words or numbers. You can also create it using ALT+0150. • Connects time periods, dates and number ranges • The weather is nice May – September. • The U.S. Civil War (1861 – 1865) was a defining moment in this country.

5. So what? • The hyphen helps avoid confusion in a sentence and thus is very important. • The man-eating shark was hungry • Two-century-old buildings were demolished. • I enjoyed my first-year seminar. • The dash makes for a stylistic sentence and serves that function better than a colon or mere period can. If you cannot get it to show up, just use two hyphens together -- • Publishers and editors will use en-dashes. Nobody else will probably ever notice if you have one or not.