Common Punctuation Errors: Hyphens and Dashes

by Ilana W-B

“As the soccer ball flew into the goal, the referee blew his whistle to signal the end of the game. I glanced at the snow-covered scoreboard and inwardly celebrated as I realized we had won, 3–2. It was the start of a good season—a winter-soccer season that would end with a national championship.”

I made that paragraph up. Outdoor winter soccer does not exist (as far as I know). However, that paragraph, though false, is still a useful example—it contains hyphens, an en dash, and an em dash. The goal of this post is to teach you how to use (and how to type) each.

I will not go into detail about when to use hyphens; that subject is lengthy enough to deserve its own post. In brief:

• Some words come with hyphens (for instance, “editor-in-chief” or “twenty-five”). 
• Other words require hyphens because of how they are used. When you use a noun or adjective in combination with another adjective to form one idea, you generally need to hyphenate. This is the case with “snow-covered” above.

There are of course other situations requiring hyphens, but that covers the vast majority. When you need a hyphen, simply type one. Unlike dashes, hyphens come directly on US keyboards.

Unfortunately, because hyphens are on the keyboard and dashes are not, many students simply use hyphens as a replacement for dashes. This is incorrect! Here are the two most common types of dashes (and the only two you are ever likely to need if you are writing in English and not compiling dictionaries or writing out mathematical equations).

The en dash expresses ranges or contrasts. Sports scores (“3–2”) and times or dates (“3pm–4pm” or “June 2–July 4”) are the most frequent situations where you’ll need the en dash. It also replaces a hyphen when you’re using compound nouns or things that are already hyphenated (“the pro-abortion–anti-abortion debate”), but you should probably just avoid phrases that require that particular usage.

A typographical note: Do not surround the en dash with spaces. No matter how much better this may look, it is always wrong. Surrounding an en dash with spaces makes it functionally equivalent to an em dash, which serves an entirely different grammatical purpose.

So how do you type an en dash? This is a little tricky. It is always available in the symbols menu of word processing programs, but it can be tedious to find it every time you need it. In Microsoft Word, type a word or number, a space, a hyphen, another space, and another word or number. On the next space you type, Word should automatically convert your hyphen to an en dash. Of course, you should now delete the spaces and replace the numbers with whatever you would actually like to have on either side of the dash. If you’re using a program other than Word, the process is probably different. A Google search with “how to type an en dash” and the name of your word processing software or operating system ought to yield results.

The final dash type we’ll explore is the em dash. This is used for separating out thoughts, much the way you might use a comma or a pair of parentheses. It generally indicates a longer pause than a comma, but material that disrupts the flow of the sentence less than a parenthetical, as in example above: “It was the start of a good season—a winter-soccer season that would end with a national championship.” Em dashes are often also used in pairs: “I had not known—how could I possibly have known?—what those two weeks would entail.” Rules for the use of an em dash are pretty fluid, but in general, you should be able to skip the part set aside by the dash or dashes and still have the sentence flow and make sense.

Most people do not space em dashes, though the rules here are less strict than they are for en dashes. Newspapers sometimes space em dashes, often using small (hair) spaces.

Typing an em dash is pretty easy. In Word, simply type a word, type two hyphens in a row, and type another word. When you type the next space, Word will automatically convert your two hyphens to an em dash. (Again, Google should provide instructions if you are using a different word processing system.) If you don’t like the aesthetics of em dashes, there are several grammatically equivalent options, including a spaced en dash and a series of two or three unspaced hyphens.

If you’d like to read more about hyphens and dashes and their correct use, here are some resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen

http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/43092.aspx

http://grammartips.homestead.com/dash.html

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/dashes.asp