Do you dash and hypen correctly?
By Jellen
@Jellen (1852)
United States
February 27, 2009 9:19am CST
The dash and hyphen aren't the same, but many writers use them as if they were. Do you use a dash--if you use one--as the grammar books dictate? Or do you use a hyphen - like this one - to punctuate your sentence? Do you put your dash next to the word--like this, or do you leave a space after the last letter and before the first of the two hyphens -- like this? Which is correct?
1 person likes this
2 responses
@charles63 (146)
• United States
28 Feb 09
I use em dashes fairly frequently, and I always leave spaces before and after them. I'm aware this is incorrect, but putting the em dashes right up agaist the adjoining words can create an eyesore, especially on the internet which treats the two em-dash-joined words as a single word. If both words are fairly long, you might get a line with a long white space at the end that looks like the end of a paragraph. If the column width is narrow, this can look positively weird. So I break this rule deliberately and hope that enough other people also break the rule so that eventually the rule will be changed.
