During the last few years that I was working, I began to notice that some of my colleagues who were otherwise careful and literate writers were omitting hyphens in their business writing. They would refer to “well established principles” or “a fifty year old building” with nary a hyphen in sight. I’m not sure why someone who wouldn’t think of writing “thats all there is” or “their he goes” saw nothing wrong with writing about a “state of the art system,” but it made me a little nuts.
But my fussiness about hyphens extends well beyond being dismayed when they’re missing. I also wince when I see them used in place of en dashes and em dashes. The en dash is slightly longer than a hyphen. (In principle it’s as long as the width of a capital N; thus the name.) It’s the dash a typographer uses to designate an interval, as in “2017–2018 was our best season yet.”
The em dash is longer still, as long as a capital M is wide, and is used to set off a parenthetical phrase, as in “I’m lucky that most of my favorite activities — eating, reading, and watching TV — are all things I can still do.” (I put spaces before and after my em dashes, but some writers don’t. Punctuation mavens say either approach is correct, though any given style guide will specify one or the other.) Sometimes the parenthetical phrase comes at the end of the sentence so that only one dash is required: “My self-consciousness has led me to look for conversation starters — questions I can ask that are reliable for getting a conversation going.”
I often see hyphens used in place of both en and em dashes, probably because the distinction was once the province only of professional typographers and isn’t taught in primary school, and also because neither dash has a dedicated key on any keyboard.
Those of us who are old enough to have learned to type on a typewriter may have adopted the convention of using two hyphens to represent an em dash, just as we learned to underline things, like book titles, that a professional typographer would italicize. Of course, neither double hyphens nor underscoring need to be used that way in this age of computerized word processing.
Because I’m such a stickler about these things, I learned that I can type an en dash on my PC keyboard by holding down the Alt key and tapping 0150 on the numeric keyboard. Alt-0151 produces an em dash. That works in most email programs and web forms, but not in Microsoft Word. But in Word you can go to File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect options and create keyboard shortcuts for typing both dashes. (I use two hyphens to type an en dash, and a hyphen followed by an equal sign to get an em dash.)
On a Mac keyboard, holding down the Option key and tapping the hyphen key produces an en dash, while holding down both the Option and Shift keys and tapping the hyphen key gets you an em dash.
Looking back over my blog posts to date, I see that I used em dashes in the large majority of them. I use them in places where most people would probably use commas or parentheses to set off a phrase, and while I use both of those approaches too, I see the em dash as having its own distinct niche in between the two — a bit more emphatic than a pair of commas but not as pronounced as using parentheses. Yes, I’ve been accused of being a pedant and a prig, but these are the little things that make me happy.
I’m happy for you, but – too much for me.
Will you give us your thoughts about parentheses? Or have you already? I use many parenthetical phrases in my own writing, but I take them out of my clients’ writing. I think of them as asides, a place for snobby, snotty or sly comments, a slight detour in the journey.
I’m with you, Paul. Hyphens, like commas, are a delimiting or grouping tool that can reduce backtracking. On the first pass, the “well” in “well established principles” could be taken by the reader’s lizard brain for its noun form, and this isn’t resolved till the word “established” is reached, but with a hyphen between them the eye understands from the start that they’re connected. Likewise, had I written “Hyphens like commas,” the reader’s first scan might have conjured images of dashing dashes and coquettish commas canoodling. It’s a minor savings in effort, but it seems a courtesy to make one’s writing that little bit easier to scan, and the savings add up. There’s a movement to dispense with hyphens for forming ad hoc compound adjectives or nouns (I take it that “ad hoc” as an adjective, as in “ad hoc committee,” doesn’t get hyphenated because it’s a foreign phrase). Maybe it’s just a matter of how far people are willing to go in their crusade to minimize punctuation. Heck, if we get rid of commas, apostrophes, and spaces while we’re at it, and rely on the reader to parse absolutely everything, we can claw our way back to ancient Greece!