Information and Services by Zac Hester

The Hyphen

I read a lot. I read books, magazines, newspapers, web sites, text books, scientific journals, PDFs, "readme" files, advertisements, and all kinds of literature on a constant basis. I read large volumes of information as a part of my job and as one of my favorite pastimes.

It is sometimes unfortunate that I read so much. I tend to be a little more critical of those who make errors in writing than others (and I'm no beacon of grammatical mastery, myself). So, instead of just telling people they have terrible grammar, I find myself attempting to help people by providing some very simple information about grammar and how to use the English language to express themselves more effectively.

The inspiration for this lingual crusade is that of a very commonly misused piece of literary sugar: the hyphen. The misuse is far more common on the web, but is creeping into more print material all the time and it's driving me crazy.

I believe most of the misuse stems from not understanding what the hyphen does and does not do in language. I will attempt to outline some of the common forms of misuse and try to describe better syntactic alternatives and finally show everyone all the really great things a hyphen can do.

Hyphen Myth 1: It's a separator.

I think the computer age and math, in general, has inspired a lot of people to start using the hyphen as a separator. It functions so well as the subtraction symbol in math, it should do about the same thing in language. Additionally, the hyphen's cousin, the dash (-- or —), looks very similar and is allowed to separate phrases in a sentence. To some extent, it can be argued that a hyphen surround by spaces (Colors - Black) works nicely to separate items in a hierarchy, but it really doesn't convey the right information as quickly as something else like a colon (Colors: Black).

Ironically, the most common misuse of a hyphen is the opposite of what it is designed to do: connect. Instead of separating phrases or words, it's meant to join or connect parts of words or lists of adjectives. It allows us to create super-intelligent mice with ex-military experience.

Separation is actually spread across a lot of other symbols in the English language and only one (the dash) even comes close to resembling the hyphen. When most people are misusing a hyphen, they are really trying to harness the power of the comma (,). Instead of "If you're ready-we should get in the car," it will work so much better to write "If you're ready, we should get in the car."

Other separators that are more appropriate include: the period (.) (hyphen misuse is sometimes a sign of run-on sentences), the colon (:) (a good separator for hierarchy and starting a list in a sentence), the semicolon (;) (a fantastic way to connect a fragment to the end of a sentence without restating awkward pronouns), and the dash (—) (which paves the way for parenthetical phrases).

Hyphen Myth 2: It's a delimiter.

This is similar to the previous myth, but needs to be mentioned separately. Not only to people tend to think the hyphen separates, they also tend to think it delimits internal phrases or parenthetical phrases. The reason this happens is obvious: many writers don't see the subtle difference in the length of the line between a hyphen (-) and a dash (—). When people were all using typewriters, this wasn't such a big issue because a dash was represented by typing two hyphens without a space (--). It's clear that that's a dash.

When a writer uses a dash, they use it to emphasize an internal phrase of a sentence much like parenthesis do, but with the opposite effect. Dashes—unlike hyphens—give us a method of highlighting this phrase to really stand out. Whereas, parenthesis (unlike dashes) allow us to separate the phrase, but make the meaning less intense.

Hyphens-unlike dashes-confuse people more than anything because they're reading it like this:

And you want them to read it like this:

Hyphens—unlike dashes—confuse people more than anything.

So, where's the dash button on my keyboard?

If you've been using a hyphen as a dash and knew the right way all along (or I've shown you the error of your ways), you're probably wondering how a computer represents a dash. There's the easy, quick way and the less easy, less quick way.

If you're not sure how your document is going to be represented (web vs. print vs. email vs. office document), it's usually safe to just use two hyphens to represent a dash. Just don't forget to use two hyphens per dash. If you know how your document is going to be used, you can usually just use the dash from your computer's character map or let a program give you a dash automatically (most word processing programs will automatically convert double-hyphens into dashes). If you're writing HTML code, you should probably start using the HTML entity code — to represent a dash.

What does a hyphen do, anyway?

As stated in myth #1, a hyphen is actually supposed to connect parts of words or entire words that are normally not connected. It's other primary purpose is to try to connect a word that is fragmented across multiple lines in a printed column of text. Although, this is becoming a bit of an outmoded concept since most publishing software does this auto-magically and the web doesn't impose columnar restrictions on text.

The two major areas that hyphens should be used are: connecting less-used prefixes and suffixes to words and joining adjectives that are describing different properties of a noun. (See the "Additional Reading" section for references to documents that show a large number of examples of proper usage.)

One place the hyphen is underused is that of describing things like amounts. Anyone who writes checks and writes the total amount in words, should be using hyphens to connect the numbers describing the amounts of dollars:

Four-hundred, thirty-six dollars and no/100

Conclusion

It's hard to change writing habits once you've become accustomed to a particular form or format. In this case, the syntax is spreading across the web and other media and obscuring meaning. It's turning, otherwise, fantastic writing into language that takes about three passes to absorb the meaning by trying to "get into the author's head."

For technical work, this is all but unacceptable. For artistic pieces, this could be relegated to style. As with any lesson in grammar: if you know the rules and you do it consistently, you can break them. Otherwise, it's best to just keep all four wheels on the road and make it a safer world for everyone else.

Additional Reading

If you're like me and would like some additional information, I found these sites through my favorite web site- er... , Google:

Last Modified: January 24, 2006