Since Wordie showed up, I’ve been using it to collect together words I like. I find that vocabulary is not something I can recall on demand—I think of the words in situations that demand them, and then afterwards hit up Wordie to log them for later perusal.

Punctuation use, for me, is similar. It’s more instinctive than thoughtful, which is a bit odd, consider my nature generally. But unfortunately, it seems that for many, the use of commas, apostrophes, and even basic spelling is neither instinctive nor thoughtful. Recently, I lashed out at someone on IM for using the letters u and r in place of the words they sound like. “The only situation,” I typed furiously, “in which it is acceptable to abuse letters of the Latin alphabet in this manner through written correspondence with me, is if you are cute, female, and single.”

The thing about poorly-punctuated emails and IM chats, though, is that the vast majority of people are at least aware that it’s informal. It’s like people doing the grind—it’s fine at night clubs, not so much at a formal occasion. ¹

So yeah. Despite this general awareness of incompetency, dashes are an area of punctuation that a lot of folks remain permanently in the dark about. I thought it might be helpful to put up a quick summary of the four main kinds you need to know about.

The Hyphen

The hyphen is that mark on the key directly to the right of the zero on your keyboard’s number row. Originally that key corresponded to the ASCII hyphen-minus character, but modern operating systems map it to the hyphen.

The hyphen is used to separate syllables or joined words. If I de-emphasize something, there needs to be a separator there to prevent it looking like deem-phasize, which is possibly plausible, given that the first half is its own word. On the other hand, if I reestablish something else, no hyphen is necessary.

The point here is not to expound on hyphenation rules, but simply to demonstrate the kinds of situations where the mark is used. The one additional use is when breaking a word across a line, on a syllable. From there come the word-processing concepts of a hard hyphen, soft hyphen, and non-breaking hyphen:

• A hard hyphen will always show, and may or may not break across a line, which is the default, and what you’d use for a word like de-emphasize.
• A soft hyphen will only show if it is breaking across a line, which is what you’d put in between the first two syllables of reestablish to allow it to break, but prevent it from looking silly if the text re-flows and it no longer needs to break.
• A non-breaking hyphen is what you’d put in telephone numbers, or a URL like experts-exchange.com. You want it to not break over a line, because the hyphen is unambiguously there–to have it break over a line would create confusion about whether or not the hyphen really exists in the URL.

So those are the hyphen options. Now, as mentioned above, the original ASCII character set encouraged confusion by making the hyphen and minus both the same character; to be fair, however, at the time the characters were all fixed-width anyways, so it made zero difference from an appearance point of view. ASCII was created in the early sixties, it would be twenty years later before it was possible to use computers for desktop publishing, at which point typography nerds suddenly started to care about this stuff.

But now we move onto the minus sign.

The Minus Sign

The left column is Times New Roman, the right is Arial. Both completely universal fonts. Can you tell the difference between the hyphen, the en dash, and the minus sign?

The hyphen is absurdly short compared with the plus sign, and it’s misplaced vertically. The en dash (second row) is almost correct horizontally, but it’s off a bit vertically. The minus sign is the exact dimensions of the plus sign’s horizontal stroke.

Nit picking? Maybe, but typesetting equations is serious business. It was this kind of stuff that drove Knuth to write TeX, in the late seventies and eighties.

The correct Unicode character for the minus sign is #8722. I’m not aware of an OS X shortcut for it, but it’s available through the character palette.

The En Dash

The en dash is for expressing closed ranges, or any kind of connection. I took a Toronto–New York flight a few weeks ago, and between baggage checks and security it took 90–120 minutes just to get into the air.

The Unicode character for the en dash is #8211, and you can insert one anywhere in OS X by hitting option-hyphen.

The Em Dash

The em dash is possibly my favourite kind—its sheer usefulness is so great as to tempt abuse. It’s a long dash that you can use to change thoughts mid-sentence, or—even better—to insert parenthetical statements without the clutter of actual parenthesis.

Other uses are for unbounded ranges (Mike Purvis, 1986—), or for blanking out expletives. (what the f—— was that all about?)

The em dash is distinctive enough from the others that many software programs make special provisions for it. In Word, typing two hyphens will generate an honest-to-goodness em dash, and the Wordpress blogging program transforms groups of two- and three hyphens into em dashes.

In Unicode, the em dash is #8212, but OS X lets you insert one anywhere with option-shift-hyphen.

Further reading

Parts of this is from an old ALA article, the rest is from Eats, Shoots, and Leaves and various Wikipedia articles like this one.

Footnotes

¹ Future article: Why on earth is not some form of partner dance taught in high school? Long term, is it more socially valuable to know how to play dodgeball, or to know the basic principles of leading and following around a ballroom? Do people play dodgeball at their weddings? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

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