One firm guideline is to always hyphenate prefixes that come before a capital letter, numeral, or date. If in doubt, use a dictionary.Īlso bear in mind that prefixes are more frequently hyphenated in British English (e.g., sub-section) than in American English (e.g., subsection). Practices also vary over time as a term becomes more common, the hyphen usually disappears (such as e-mail, which has gradually turned into email). The related use of asterisks for the coarser words).Use the best grammar checker available to check for common mistakes in your text.įew fixed rules exist about whether hyphens should be used to connect prefixes (such as un, pre, and multi). ![]() Writers today would hesitate to write out such mild oaths in full (but compare Instead of Go to the devil! Such usages strike us as comical now, and few Victorian novelists often wrote d-n in place of damn, and even Go to the d-l! Omission of several letters from a word or a name. Now felt to be antique and genteel, a dash is occasionally used to represent the Novels, but this is not a usage you should imitate. It is not used to introduce a direct quotation, except sometimes in Interruption: the dash is never used in place of a hyphen, after a colon Overuse of dashes will give your writing a breathless and disjointed appearance.Īnd don't use a dash for any purpose other than setting off a strong That's all there is to know about the dash. Not do this automatically, however, and it will require some fiddling. Next, you should try to ensure that the dash is placed at the end of the first lineĪnd not at the beginning of the second, if you can. When a dash falls between the end of one line and the beginning of the (If the sentence merely tails off into silence, we use, Note that, in this case, the dash is written solid next to the unfinished piece-of-a-word which precedes it. General Sedgwick's last words to his worried staff were "Don't worry,īoys they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-". Without being completed, a single dash is also used: Such as you might find in a novel it is never appropriate in formal writing.įinally, in the rare case in which a sentence is broken off abruptly This sort of broken sentence is only found in representations of conversation, John, do you suppose you could - oh, never mind I'll do it. In the case in which the original sentence is never resumed after the In 1453 Sultan Mehmed finally took Constantinople - and theīyzantine Empire disappeared from the map forever. If the strong interruption comes at the end of the sentence, then of There is no other word for it - upon the indigenous population, When the Europeans settled in Tasmania, they inflicted genocide. The destruction of Guernica - and there is no doubt that the destruction Set off weak interruptions.) Here are some examples:Īn honest politician - if such a creature exists - would never agree to (Remember that the same thing is true of bracketing commas, which Principle, at least, dashes come in pairs, though sometimes one of them is not Violently disrupts the flow of the sentence.) Again, note that word `pair': in Interruption from the rest of the sentence. The dash has only one use: a pair of dashes separates a strong I prefer the first style, since it is much easier on the eye, and I recommend that Both conventions are in use, and hence you may see either of Uses no white spaces at all, but writes the dash solid next to whatever precedesĪnd follows it. Modern one is to put white spaces at both ends of a dash, while the older style There are two slightly different conventions for using a dash. Produce a proper dash and save you from worrying about this. In any case, you will be very unlucky if your word processor can't Hyphen in other contexts, you should consider using the more vivid double You are writing for publication, you will probably have to use the single More prominent than a single one and avoids any possibility of ambiguity. That I strongly prefer the American style, since the double hyphen is far more American usage, inĬontrast, uses two consecutive hyphens - like this (A). ![]() Use only a single hyphen to represent a dash - like this. If your keyboard can't produce aĭash, you will have to resort to a hyphen as a stand-in. ![]() Usually produce one in one way or another. Few keyboards have a dash, but a word processor can The dash ( -), also called the em dash, is the long horizontal bar, much
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