Dashing
I apologise for the small number of reviews posted around here these days. Uni work has started to seem more important, which means one must spend solid time intending to do work, and a large project like a review simply can’t fit into such improvisational time-wasting.
Today I learned about hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes. Hyphens, of course, are the little dashes that you make when you press the key between ‘0’ and ‘=’ at the top of your keyboard. If you’ve got a sensible keyboard, anyhow. They’re used to join words together like combined last names, and see-saw. Often they’re phased out of common usage because coordinator looks nicer than co-ordinator and it’d be a bitch to pronounce any other way.
The dashes are a bit different though. You’ll probably have noticed that when you write a sentence with a hyphen separating it, such as
Examples – so difficult to think of relevant ones…
Word will stretch out the hyphen when you press ‘space’ after typing “so”, making:
Examples — so difficult to think of relevant ones…
This may please you or piss you off, but Word is being reasonably helpful here — when you use a dash to separate two ideas like that (in a similar way to a comma or colon), it’s correct to use what’s called an em-dash. This dash is named because it’s the width of a lowercase ‘m’, theoretically.
The other dash is an en-dash — the width of an ‘n’ — which is used for situations joining words or numbers together that aren’t making their own word in the hyphen style. For example: 1914–1918, or the Burke–Wills Expedition.
Of course all these rules are just guidelines. Some people like using em-dashes to separate ideas, others use brackets first. Some like semicolons. The Australian Cambridge Style Guide did suggest however that it was unlikely that a sentence could work effectively with a tiered system of all three within it.
This is just a teaser of my forthcoming essay on the use of dashes. It’s for Principles of Editing and Publishing, but I might publish it on grapefruit too, if I feel particularly malicious.
I should point out that a forum has appeared on grapefruit — use it wisely. If at all. And I promise to review some stuff soon.
[added later: Heh. Well, in Trebuchet MS on the Mac at least, en-dashes and hyphens look highly similar. But if you’re using Firefox, you can switch to ‘No Style’ and see that in most fonts, there is a difference.]
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Andy
October 27th, 2004 at 3:38 am
Much of this was covered in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which I presume you’ve all read. Reading my review doesn’t count as reading the book you know.
It only mentioned hyphens and dashes not this fancy en and em stuff. Your en-dashes and hyphens look suspicously similar. Despite your assurances about the difference, I’m not convinced. The book did mention that on a typewriter you can join two hyphens together to make a dash. Another such useless fact is today used to be written as to-day.
Aside from the lack of grammar education at school, most people wouldn’t notice such things, especially since there is only a hyphen on a keyboard. People are unlikely to hunt through the symbols menu and find the dash and wonder about its usage.
Have you learnt about semi-colons yet?
Tom
October 27th, 2004 at 10:33 am
So, much of this was covered in Eats, Shoots and Leaves… except the stuff about em-dashes and en-dashes? Clearly, not so exhaustive, but I do mean to read it very soon.
As I said, the difference between en and hyphens is clear in Times New Roman for example. I had a brief look at semicolons, but found that the hyphen in that word has gone the way of the dodo too.
People are unlikely to go looking for em-dashes, but the fact is that if they’re using Word — and most people are — then they’ll get them anyhow. And we of course can use them here by putting two dashes together.
Andy
October 27th, 2004 at 7:07 pm
Errata: The book is not as exhaustive as I made it out to be.
Semicolons don’t have a hyphen.
People will use dashes although they won’t know that they are. I think they should be aware of such things.
Tom
October 29th, 2004 at 1:21 pm
They should be aware. Perhaps we could hijack a truck and drive around Melbourne reading out Eats, Shoots and Leaves through a megaphone?
Word converts two hyphens to an em-dash as well. Or at least, it used to. I haven’t tried it since I had it on my old 486. Ah, Windows 3.1. Now there was an operating system. If you want some retro fun click on “things they say” here.