The rules of what to hyphenate and when constitute pages of editorial handbooks, and could be an entire post in themselves (there’s an idea), but trusty Word will highlight words or phrases that it thinks should be hyphenated, and it usually gets it right.Īs the language evolves, modern thinking is to use fewer hyphens, and words that were once hyphenated now tend to run together, as in airstream, or hitchhiker. Soft hyphens are those that merely indicate that the word continues on the next line.They’re the type of hyphen that asks you, “You lookin’ at me?”, and have spider-web tattoos on their necks. Hard hyphens make compound words and phrases out of shorter words, so machine-gun, or drip-proof.

Hyphens have a very specific use, which is … drum-roll … hyphenation. Most computer keyboards have a dedicated key for the hyphen (usually at the end of the line of numerals along the top of the keyboard). When most people think of dashes, they first think of hyphens, those little micro dashes that join words together. Definition & Use of the Three Kinds of Dashes Hyphens There are three different types of dash, they all have different uses, and if you don’t use them in the right place your editor (whom you’ve hired at great expense) will have to spend time fixing them, when they could be helping you with more interesting facets of your book. Then I became an editor, and in the course of training, duly became privy to the arcane laws of dashes. I thought it was perhaps a particular type of font, or just that some publishers liked longer lines and some liked shorter ones. (There are slightly different styles for some academic and newspaper writing.) Over to Richard for enlightenment… Must Dash!īefore I became an editor, I had only vaguely noticed that some dashes were longer than others. Today ALLi Partner member Richard Bradburn, managing editor of editorial.ie sets us straight on that tricky issue the correct format for dashes in our fiction. Cutting a dash today on the blog is Richard Bradburn, editor and author

Short poem with dashes