The em is an expansive, attention-seeking dash.

In the bygone days of typewriters, the em dash was rendered as two hyphens (-), but today modern word processing packages offer a genuine em dash in their special character sets. The em dash-so called because in traditional typesetting it was the length of a capital M-is often known by its more pedestrian, non-alphabetical name, the long dash. the worst paying jobs ( the jobs that pay the worst? or the worst of the paying jobs?).a small armed man ( a man who should build his biceps? or one who is puny and carrying weapons?).A compound missing its hyphen can perplex and befuddle. If you need a hyphen for clarity, leave it in. When in doubt, remember that hyphens exist primarily to help readers get the meaning. But when the compound serves as an adjective or a noun, it is.Ī good dictionary and a reliable style guide are indispensable aids for navigating the labyrinth of hyphen use. Such compounds never take hyphens.Ī compound verb made up of a verb plus an adverb or a preposition is normally not hyphenated.

One important exception occurs when the first part of the compound modifier is an adverb ending in -ly. For instance, a hyphen often joins a compound modifier when the modifier precedes the word described, but not when it follows it. No wonder John Benbow, former editor of the Oxford University Press stylebook, once warned, 'If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.' Still, there are some general principles. The guidelines for compounding with hyphens fill eleven pages in The Canadian Style ( 2nd ed., 1997), twelve in The Chicago Manual of Style ( 16th ed., 2010). Why do people sign up for things on a sign-up sheet? How can someone wear a tight-fitting skirt and a tightly woven scarf? Why is a well-tailored suit well tailored? And a long-term plan a scheme for the long term? Herein lies the hyphen’s beauty, and its perversity. And most commonly, as in the headline above, it glues together compound structures.

It divides words at the end of lines in typeset material. It punctuates phone numbers, ISBN codes on books and other strings of numerals. The hyphen, which shares a key with the underscore mark on the standard keyboard, has several functions. Zoologists have discovered a mysterious new fungus that is killing the world’s frogs and toads, New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.Ī single misplaced hyphen and the reader expects destructive frogs instead of a deadly fungus. ZOOLOGISTS ID MYSTERIOUS FUNGUS-KILLING FROGS

Another word for sign up sheet