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Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoIf you're using a compose key, the en- and em-dash are "--." and "---" respectively.
- layer8 4y agoPersonally I use "2-" and "3-".
- Ennea 4y ago"Do the first two look the same to you? It’s because some devices display them inconsistently, when the characters sit all by themselves." And also because this article uses an en dash in the table in place of a hyphen.
- tsimionescu 4y agoI guess they respected their own recommendations: "when you're trying to illustrate what a hyphen looks like" was not one of the recommended uses of a hyphen! I should also note that this whole point seems at best a point for typography geeks. These are three almost identical marks that have very similar uses. I am completely convinced that no one has ever disambiguated a phrase by noticing that something is a hyphen and not an en-dash or vice-versa.
- starkparker 4y agoInterestingly, if I copy that first character in the table early enough in the page load, it's a hyphen. If I copy it later, it's an en dash. Considering that this article is from 2010, I assume there's some JS added in the last 12 or so years that's autoconverting it. EDIT: Wayback confirms it's supposed to be a hyphen: https://web.archive.org/web/20120120121527/http://www.punctuationmatters.com/the-hyphen-dash-n-dash-and-m-dash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120120121527/http://www.punctu...
- anderskaseorg 4y agoIt’s the server (probably WordPress’s fault), not JS. – is an en dash: $ curl -s https://www.punctuationmatters.com/en-dash-em-dash-hyphen/ | grep -A6 '<h3>What' <h3>What do they look like?</h3> <table style="height: 139px;" width="289"> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong> –</strong></td> <td><strong> hyphen </strong></td> </tr>
- bluenose69 4y agoA good resource for those of us who like TeX and LaTeX: https://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/latex.html https://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/latex.html
- neop1x 4y agoThis gives me a bad feeling as I am immediately imaging copy&pasting some code with dashes replaced by this aesthetic Unicode and having to fix every occurrence of it before I can run it...
- swyx 4y agoin 180 characters: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1344127570753646593 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1344127570753646593 A guide to the 3 dashes in English: Hyphens (-) are compound-words. En dashes (⌥ -) connect beginning–ending. Em dashes (⌥⇧-) can replace parentheses and colons — use them more!
- perihelions 4y agoOr in Linux, En dash (–): Compose - - . Em dash (—): Compose - - - https://tstarling.com/stuff/ComposeKeys.html https://tstarling.com/stuff/ComposeKeys.html https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/en_US.UTF-8.html https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e...
- teddyh 4y agoAlso on Windows: http://wincompose.info/ http://wincompose.info/
- politelemon 4y agoOf the three major OSes, Linux has the most intuitive way of producing special characters with its compose keys
- otherme123 4y agoTo my surprise, no spaces around mdash is the general recommendation.
- tekkk 4y agoIf you have three lines that practically look the same, they should be the same character. Otherwise, interesting read!
- chrismorgan 4y agoThey are only mildly similar in appearance, and they have wildly different uses and purposes, all attested for hundreds of years. Unification would very obviously be a terrible idea. ASCII unified these and more for technical reasons, and it meant that nuance or correctness was occasionally lost, people doubled and/or tripled the character to make dashes, and the results were just plain ugly. Look, even that HYPHEN-MINUS unification that ASCII foisted on us is problematic without considering dashes, because HYPHEN and MINUS SIGN were often fairly different in appearance, and still should normally be at least somewhat different, even after a few decades of misuse due to the bad unification. A hyphen is much shorter, typically lower-placed, and in serif fonts often slanted (the left end lower than the right), whereas the minus sign is the horizontal half of a plus sign.
- tsimionescu 4y agoThe unification of minus, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash is entirely natural. Back when I was in school ~25 years ago, in newly-non-communist Romania where ASCII was at best a distant idea, no one taught any difference between these signs. We did have different names for the minus sign and the dash used in writing (and Romanian uses a lot of dashes), but that's it. We were taught to use the exact same sign for compound words, for other Romanian orthography, for separating words at the end of a line, and as one option for introducing parenthetical clauses - like this. And it was the same sign we used for minus in math class. A slightly longer dash was often used for one particular purpose*, though even that was not explicitly stated, and you wouldn't get lower marks even in calligraphy classes for using shorter dashes instead. * Romanian uses these longer dashes when representing lines of dialogue, especially in literature, as in: -- I would like to go to the mall. -- That sounds wonderful!
- Symbiote 4y ago
- IIAOPSW 4y agoOh this is easy. m dash: -- n dash: -. .. I take it few people find morse code puns funny anymore. Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry. What does having 3 basically identical characters add to the language other than a pointless rules for insufferable pedants to power trip over. We've all been using - just fine. On what basis does the person writing this article believe these rules matter, are important, disambiguate language? Call me a hopeless philistine, but I say down with the dash. One symbol is fine for word-compounding, numerical ranges, subtraction, mid word line breaks. No one needs an em dash to tell them pages 3-8 is not a compound word.
- 6th 4y agoI_for⁃one−do–not-care—what--line-thing-ies–areｰused&∴I༌wish‑goodluck to those·that·care.¶
- frizlab 4y agoAn example from the article: Looks good: “Sometimes writing for money—rather than for art or pleasure—is really quite enjoyable.” Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money-rather than for art or pleasure-is really quite enjoyable.” Yes, punctation does matter. (In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.)
- askvictor 4y agoI disagree that the first example looks good. Both cases would be better with spaces, which kind of renders the em dash unnecessary.
- ghaff 4y agoSome places I write for use the em-dash with spaces and some without. I try to remember which is which but I often forget.
- 83457 4y agoI just use commas or parens.
- jotaen 4y ago> Some people prefer the way a “space-en-dash-space” looks. I think this isn’t just a matter of personal preference, but it’s also largely a cultural thing – in German, for example, the “space-en-dash-space” form is common. This is true for a lot of other punctuation as well. For instance, in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”. Whereas in Switzerland or France, it’s common to quote using Guillemets, as in «Hello there!». This style can also be found in German texts, though it’s less common than quotation marks, and it would typically be used »inversely«.
- Symbiote 4y agoUsing an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style. The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
- laserlight 4y agoI consider a crime not to have any spaces between em-dashes and adjacent words. Traditionally, I guess, there were spaces of different sizes. Hair-thin spaces were typeset before and after em-dashes --- that's what I do in LaTeX using (\,). But, because different sized spaces have never been a thing on the Web, let alone plain text, people have preferred to not use any spaces, for some reason.
- Symbiote 4y agoHN normalizes thin and hair spaces to normal spaces, so they can't be demonstrated here, but there is an example on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spaces_around_dashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
- bee_rider 4y agoOh dang the hair spaces look perfect.
- FabHK 4y ago
- strogonoff 4y agoFor a somewhat more advanced (and IMHO much more beautifully typeset) but still succinct overview of em dash (and some other dashes) in practical use, see https://twos.dev/dashes.html https://twos.dev/dashes.html. Suitable for those who are familiar with punctuation basics but may want a refresher, and AFAICT gets some things more correctly (e.g., the numbers in a range are generally separated by a figure dash, not en dash).
- Aardwolf 4y agoWhich one of these, then, is for minus?
- doubleunplussed 4y agoHyphen. You'll also hear it called "hyphen-minus"
- teddyh 4y ago"Hyphen‐minus" is an ASCII abomination, and should only be used in ASCII‐constrained environments. Hyphen is hyphen and minus is minus: ‐ 002010;HYPHEN;Pd;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;; − 002212;MINUS SIGN;Sm;0;ES;;;;;N;;;;;
- Aardwolf 4y agoThe issue of non-ASCII-constrained environments is that it's still not easily accessible on most keyboards. I do know and use the compose key but it's not the same as having a standard key for it. Trying on a mobile device, long pressing the dash key there suggests 2 dashes (not sure if the second choice is en-dash or em-dash), which is some but that's not the 4 types discussed here.
- teddyh 4y agoIf a character is too difficult to type on some specific system, that is indeed a constrained environment.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoI also avoid em dash for being too big and prefer just using en dash when I would have used it
- chrismorgan 4y agoThe article misses the rather important piece of trivia about technology compromises that what it has been calling “hyphen” is actually U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, rather than U+2010 HYPHEN. The situation there is a real mess: HYPHEN-MINUS is ugly in many fonts due to compromising between the ideal appearances of a hyphen and a minus sign, and HYPHEN is often missing from the font, leading to falling back to a hyphen from a different font rather than HYPHEN-MINUS from the same font (which is clearly more desirable, but technically unappealing). A comment led to the follow-up https://www.punctuationmatters.com/the-difference-between-a-dash-and-a-minus-sign/ https://www.punctuationmatters.com/the-difference-between-a-..., but it’s still very insufficient, only dealing with MINUS SIGN and assuming HYPHEN-MINUS was exclusively a hyphen. And appears to have suffered from the same replacement of lone HYPHEN-MINUS with EN DASH as this article.
- cheschire 4y agoI get why you wrote those words in all caps but it still feels like you’re yelling emphatically about nothing, and that coincidentally sums up how I feel about the rest of this topic.
- jurimasa 4y agoThats so myopically HN... "I don't care about it, so it's probably not important and dumb anyway lol"
- klabb3 4y agoAgreed it’s very HN. But it’s not just bad. Hackers are usually hard-wired to reduce entropy—we’re quick to point out when something is redundant or unnecessarily ambiguous. Formalia is also used for gatekeeping, which the HN Zeitgeist doesn’t like. That said, personally I need my different dashes, commas and parentheses for my excessive wavering.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoAnd to the one expressing that thought, you're right. To them, it's not important, and dumb. You could argue, however, that they should refrain from posting, but they probably felt the need to share in case others felt the same way.
- gizajob 4y agoOne of the main things I learned about writing during my philosophy degree...
- askvictor 4y agoNext up: why three periods for an ellipsis is bad and you should feel bad for doing it.
- pepa65 4y agoNo, what's bad is having those 3 periods squashed into the space of 1 character..!
- frosted-flakes 4y agoThat's only the case for monospaced fonts.
- ofalkaed 4y agoThis guide and most guides like it tend to miss the most important and powerful use of the em-dash and make it out like you can use it for anything but really they are just missing the wonderful simplicity of the em-dash and how versatile that simplicity is. The em-dash raises and lowers the narrative voice. In fiction this provides a way to provide insight into the narrator; an em-dash tells us we are switching from the story the narrator is telling us to the thoughts of the narrator, a second em-dash or a period lowers the voice back down to the story the narrator is conveying. This is the sense of dialog being introduced with em-dashes instead of being quoted, a new line starting with an em-dash lowers the narrative voice, narrator hands story off to character. The simplified rules for the em-dash are pretty much intuited and prescribed versions of this which gut the effectiveness of em-dash. In general use an em-dash should be used to denote thoughts without having too restructure/delete what you just wrote to accommodate that thought. Edit: I oversimplified. Consistency is what is important, using an em-dash like a comma that isn't a comma leads to ambiguity when you also use commas. A writer who avoids semicolons and quotes all dialog can use an em-dash very differently than raising the voice, but they can also use a semi-colon very differently than its standard accepted role, that is what these simple guides miss, the consistency of usage, they just list all of the various ways you could use any given mark and people start using an em-dash to "fix" their long run-on sentence with all of its commas. The closest thing we have to standard use allows for wonderfully complex sentences which can convey great meaning but consistent and well defined use is most important. comma - connects independent and dependent clauses em-dash - raises and lowers the voice semicolon - connects independent clauses in a more direct way than the paragraph colon - elaborates an idea parenthesis - an aside, stated instead of thought period - end of thought Question mark and exclamation points do not need to be at the end of a sentence, they can double as comma, semicolon, or colon. I seem to be missing a nuance of HN's line breaks and formatting.
- arketyp 4y agoDo you have a reference for this? Never heard that particular framing about the narrative voice before. You call it a versatile simplicity, but to me it sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.
- vidarh 4y agoI can't get myself to care. I've written two novels, and hundreds of thousands of words of articles and internal documents, and I can't for the life of me remember the rules for this, and neither can most other people. For my novels, my editor fixed it, because there are the odd pedant that cares and leave negative reviews of these things are not "right". For everything else I just use hyphens. It does not matter - it is clear from context.
- GuB-42 4y ago> For my novels, my editor fixed it, because there are the odd pedant that cares and leave negative reviews of these things are not "right". Which means it is important. At least important enough to be worth spending money on and expect return (editors don't work for free). Maybe not for articles and internal documents, and even less for HN comments, but there are circumstances where it is, like in novels.
- vidarh 4y agoI'd get exactly zero discoint if I told my editor to ignore dashes. It's not where their time goes.
- bobse 4y agoIt's like a minus sign (-) but for "special" people?
- layer8 4y agoA typographically correct minus sign is “−”, not “-”.
- Voklen 4y agoI do often wonder whether we should maintain traditional typography when moving to a digital age because punctuation evolves as language does. If we’ve deemed it unnecessary to have seperate symbols for each of the dashes and everyone uses language that way then that’s fine. We can also ask this question about smart quotes, you’ll notice I’ve been using the U+2019 as the apostrophe here and I could “quote” like this. It's a question of how much ambiguity it causes, how easy it is to input, and how subjectively aesthetically pleasing it is. My personal opinion for hyphens is: - Ambiguity: most can be cleared up with spaces, and for examples like 3-8 if it’s numbers we can tell it’s a range from context - Ease of input: one character is a lot easier to decide between than 3 (or 4 if you include minus), and if there are rules for software to be able to input the correct character every time then the differences in characters become redundant - Subjective aesthetics: I quite like the consistent compactness of the single hyphen And for quotes: - Ambiguity: They show when quotes start and end which is quite nice and we can have nested quotes. But these are things that are not critical to meaning and simply make it easier - Ease of input: Usually automated but can absolutely tear through code if pasted in the wrong place. If we deem these smart quotes useful enough then they can coexist with typewriter quotes peacefully if we do not run the quote formatting on code blocks (which is where code should be anyway) - Subjective aesthetics: I do like the look of smart quotes but would be willing to use straight quotes
- xeonmc 4y agoWhat about using tilde for numeric ranges? "The global conflict spanning the years 1939~1945 is known as World War 2..."
- Voklen 4y agoOhh yes, reducing the amount of tasks the hyphen is used for helps as well
- scbrg 4y agoTilde is already used for approximation though. The sentence as you wrote it could be misinterpreted as "the conflict spanning the years 1939 to ca. 1945...". Had you used a dash/hyphen/minus/whatever nobody would be likely to misinterpret that as "the conflict spanning the years minus six..."
- yakubin 4y agoIn Polish em dash is supposed to be surrounded with spaces. I got that rule ingrained in my subconscious so heavily that I feel very uneasy looking at em dashes without spaces even in English. Same way if someone didn’t put a space after a full stop. So I’ve decided to go the British way and use en dash surrounded with spaces. And, after doing that, em dash really feels way too long. :)
- ourmandave 4y agoCan we at least get all the people making "no one" into one word ("noone", which drives me crazy) to hyphenate it? Or does no-one care but me?
- loevborg 4y agoLiterally noöne
- bdg 4y agoI'm just going to leave this here for you https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/firstable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/firstable
- spiralx 4y agoI dislike that alot.
- euroderf 4y agoPowergen Italia, anyone ?
- layer8 4y agoFor a long time, I thought there is actually a word "noone" pronounced with an "oo" sound like "noon". You know, like no one says "whom" anymore but you still see it written.
- spruengli 4y ago[dead]
- anothernewdude 4y agoThis is now pretty much nonsense, because of technology every dash is a hypen.
- andrewinardeer 4y agoI'm surprised no one has brought up the excessive waste of energy that has occurred when m-dashes have been misused when the correct character should have been an hyphen or an n-dash. Those additional pixels have no doubt contributed to kilograms of mankind's carbon footprint. /s
- crazygringo 4y agoNot to mention the extra key strokes required to type an em dash! They have surely accelerated the onset of people's carpal tunnel syndrome by as much as a couple of minutes. Will no one think of the wrists?!
- IncRnd 4y agoThis is way too much pedantry and hyper-hyphen-focus. Honestly, I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will. They add nothing to anyone's communications. Perhaps, typesetting still uses these, but that's okay. They can keep doing so, since these probably add aesthetic appeal to how flyers are designed. I also noticed a pundit-battle brewing in the depths of the hyphen-m&ndash-soup. The article: Let’s make that even more clear. THE EN DASH IS ABOUT AS WIDE AS AN UPPERCASE N; THE EM DASH IS AS WIDE AS AN M. Yet, from another dash-hyphen pundit... [1] En and em dashes aren’t called that because they’re as wide as a lowercase “n” and a lowercase “m.” They’re called that because those are the specific typography jargon words that refer to the height of a physical piece of type (the “em,” also called the “mutton” to reduce confusion) and half that height (the “en,” also called the “nut”). An em dash was originally as wide as the font is tall. [1] https://leffcommunications.com/2021/03/10/a-brief-history-of-dashes/ https://leffcommunications.com/2021/03/10/a-brief-history-of...
- throwingrocks 4y ago[flagged]
- IncRnd 4y agoI'm against ped:antic-pun-ctu,ation)) not against pretty, practical and productive punctuation.
- ivanstegic 4y agoFor someone who can quote Shakespeare [1] in a comment at the right time, you “…doth protest too much, methinks.” [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086851
- IncRnd 4y agoAh, I am cut to the quick. In truth, one must sometimes be cruel to be kind. To one such as I, neither the hyphen nor the dash are a dish fit for the gods. In tragic travesty, it's all Greek to me. All that glitters isn't gold! [1] [1] a bunch of Shakespeare's sayings scraped together, after they were trampled in a mosh pit.
- johnbellone 4y agoA site that pulls on my heart strings.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIt ... somewhat ... saddens me that HN's parser doesn't distinguish these as Markdown-based comment systems do: Hyphen: - En dash: -- Em dash: --- On usage --- I find the practice of using the em-dash without bounding spaces (typical of most modern style-guides) is visually distracting and more difficult to read than when spaces are provided around the punctuation (as I've done here, and my stylometric stalkers may file as a personal identification tell). And finally: - Hyphenated. - Non-hyphenated. There is no justice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wruza 4y agoAlthough that allows “hypenated-and-autological”, which is very useful under some circumstances and in frontend.
- BrandonS113 4y agoIt is easy to say this doesn’t matter, and personally, I couldn’t care less which is used. However, professionally, I have twice in the past two months had a deal with text that was edited by line editor for my organisation, where they strongly criticised our use of these punctuation markers. And, after much cursing, and my team spending time changing the text, I reflected, and came to like those punctuation markers. Took me a long time, but I have been converted.
- boffinism 4y ago(These rules apply to American English, not British English. I can't speak for other languages and variants.)
- masswerk 4y agoAnother job for the en-dash: association E.g. in names, "Initech – Infinite Tech Company" (We may even argue that ranges or dates are a special case of this, as we associate two or more particles in order to form a broader concept.)
- larrymcp 4y agoIronically on a punctuation blog, it looks like he has a punctuation typo in his title. In the headline, the semi-colon after "hyphen" should actually be a colon. So the corrected headline is "En dash, em dash and hyphen: what’s the difference?" A colon is used in this context, when you're introducing the question that follows.
- gverrilla 4y agoThis article is wrong all over, from where I stand. Who uses semi-colon in titles???
- esperent 4y agoEveryone complaining about pedantry here, while I'm thinking this doesn't go nearly far enough. I'd like to propose that all punctuation marks should come in minutely different sizes with different meanings, not just the various dashes. Take the full stop. There should be a second version that's about .25 pts larger and means an emphatic full stop (not to be confused with a bold full stop, of course. That would be dumb). But why stop there? Let's add another one that's raised a tiny fraction from the baseline. About 0.1 pts should do it. This one should mean a shorter pause, somewhere between a full stop and a comma. And anyone who can't discern the difference, such as dyslexics and the short sighted, should be publicly whipped and forced to wear a hat off shame for a week. The hats, of course, being very slightly different shades of grey depending on which incorrect punctuation mark they used.
- pwdisswordfishc 4y ago> What do they look like? > – hyphen Hmm, that hyphen looks a bit long… $ unicode – U+2013 EN DASH UTF-8: e2 80 93 UTF-16BE: 2013 Decimal: – Octal: \020023 – Category: Pd (Punctuation, Dash); East Asian width: A (ambiguous) Unicode block: 2000..206F; General Punctuation Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals) <p style="voice-family: 'The Senate'"> Ironic.
- RobertRoberts 4y agoThe lack of capitalization (even on HN) is a regression far worse than dash mis-use.
- toastal 4y agoThey love to overcapitalize here as well. If I had a dollar for every SASS, LESS, and FF instead of their correct Sass, Less, Fx forms…
- tromp 4y agoThis reminds me of one of Weird Al's better songs "Word Crimes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
- ehsankia 4y agoSo basically, N Dash is a rich man's hyphen and M Dash is a rich man's comma?
- mfsch 4y agoOne distinction that I had missed for a long time is that the en-dash is used instead of the hyphen to connect words in the “and” sense, such as “read–eval–print loop” or “Myers–Briggs personality type”. I find that the en-dash makes it a bit more clear that the words are sort of “on equal footing” and it’s not one word modifying the other one.
- glacials 4y agoFor a little more on these with a focus on CSS and practical issues, I wrote an article a couple years back called Advanced Dashes: https://twos.dev/dashes.html https://twos.dev/dashes.html
- sirodoht 4y agoAnother resource on the matter, which I really like overall: https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html
- dathinab 4y agoDoes anyone still care for the en-dash today outside of very formal literature? It seems to be quasi dead and anyway often indistinguishable if not written side by side with a hyphen. Furthermore I would argue that if the meaning of your sentence is ambiguous if a hyphen instead of an en-dash is used you should reformulated it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JasserInicide 4y agoIs there a similar article that we can get to chide people that use the double dot ellipsis (..)? It's not a thing, but I see it everywhere from casual conversation to business's websites. I despise it.
- layer8 4y agoYeah, you often don’t know if it’s meant to be an ellipsis or just a typo for a single dot.
- handsclean 4y agoOh man, I didn’t know other people did this, I invented it in my friend group. Never in proper writing, only texting. To me it conveys a tone that other punctuation can’t replicate. For example: Ok.. - Ok, but I’m unsure about this Ok - Ok Ok… - Ok, but I’m sad or resigned about this, and I want you to address that Ok. - Ok, and that’s final Ok? - I don’t know why you’re saying this, explain yourself Ok…? - I don’t know where you’re going with this, explain yourself Even writing “Ok, but I’m unsure about this” isn’t the same, because that calls more attention to your hesitation. If you don’t use “..”, your only alternative is to spend a minute basically doing translation work between inflected English and monotone English, maybe arriving at something like “Ok, I’ll try”, or more likely just give up and communicate in lower fidelity.
- SoftTalker 4y agoIn an era when “they” can be a singular reference, worrying about the typography of various dashes seems like a pointless concern. Whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash is used has far less impact on clarity than pronoun-antecedent disagreement.
- jraph 4y agoI don't see the link "they" and dashes. This seems like two completely separate matters / whataboutism.
- kanbara 4y agothe singular they with singular _agreeing_ antecedent has been in use since the 14th C. https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=they https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=they and the modern hyphen that sits on the same line as the text is from… Gutenberg. 1455. 15th C. maybe after almost 700 years we can stop complaining that non-binary and trans people are ruining language, and start accepting that they can be singular and plural. and that it has uses to refer to persons of unknown gender or as a standin for a known gender. it’s pretty common and is not going to change because you don’t like it.
- SoftTalker 4y agoNot according to all the grammar I ever learned. It’s not a trans/gender thing. It’s lazy and unclear writing. It would be much better to have declared a new singular gender neutral pronoun than having to disambiguate “they” every time it is used.
- more_corn 4y agoDear Notion, Stop turning my double dashes into mdashes. My shell doesn’t consider them interchangeable.
- motohagiography 4y agoPunctuation matters in publishing. In comments however, errors become style.
- eslaught 4y agoSince we're here, what kind of dash do you use for dates? 2023-03-12 I've tried to be more dash-correct, but I've realized there are corner cases that none of these guides address.
- layer8 4y agoISO 8601 specifies to use a hyphen. In freeform text this also makes sense in that you could use an en-dash to specify a date range: 2023-03-12–2023-04-10. (ISO 8601 uses slashes for time intervals.)
- mNovak 4y agoMy opinion on this matter is entirely driven by the fact that I got used to easy '--' and '---' en/em dashes in LaTex. So now when I use Word, I added autocorrection triggers for '--' and '_-' to the same effect. But, it makes this whole em dash-filled thread very confusing to read as everyone (from my viewpoint) is using en dashes (--) where em dashes belong!
- RobLach 4y agoBasically never use en dashes or em dashes because they are no longer colloquial.
- FpUser 4y ago>"How to use en dash, em dush ..." How about stop fucking with people's brains. Hyphen - with spaces when needed - works just fine. I personally prefer round brackets ( have no idea if it is "legal" though ). I understand it matters in publishing but then leave it to them to make things pretty.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThe em dash: that character that teaches you you can't use 7-bit ascii anymore.
- blueridge 4y agoGreat editorial reference: https://www.holloway.com/g/editorial-style https://www.holloway.com/g/editorial-style
- yunruse 4y agoI seem to have taken a weird personal style of using dashes in the context that an en dash is used for a splitting clause – like this – whereas an em dash is used only before a finishing clause — like this. Curious to see if there are any uses for steganography with this (or just identifying people by writing style).
- meling 4y agoThis advice is not only important for the visuals. Ignoring this advice also results in weird pauses for people that use screen readers.
- nayuki 4y agoMinus wasn't mentioned in the article, but the distinction between hyphen-minus (U+2D) and minus sign (U+2212) is very important. When you put plus and minus side by side (+−) such as in a financial context, the two horizontal lines should be in the same vertical position and both characters should have the same width. Whereas plus and hyphen-minus (+-) will have the hyphen-minus narrower and higher/lower.
- joegahona 4y agoEn dashes are ugly bastards that have very little benefit. Word and Google Docs inaccurately convert hyphens into en dashes, and I never have gotten a satisfactory answer why. I used to see en dashes to connect a compound modifier to yet another word, like “billiard-ball–size hail” (that’s an en dash between “ball” and “size”), but I could never trace this “rule” to any style guide. Another popular case was a proper noun connected to another word, like “New York–based author.” Computers require contortions to create em and en dashes (especially on PCs), so they’ve mostly gotten ditched. The choice of spaces or no spaces around an em dash created with two hyphens is largely stylistic, but I see spaces far more often than the closed-up version. (Oddly, in books and magazines it’s opposite, at least in the U.S.; the closed-up version of the “true” em dash is more prevalent.) Hyphens and hyphenation rules really do deserve more attention, in my opinion. I was an editor in the publishing world before moving to tech 15 years ago, and a lot of the hyphenation could get really stupid in that universe. E.g., nobody’s going to misread “ice cream cone,” but some copy editors will insist on “ice-cream cone.” Same with “credit-card bill.” But there are lots of very technical documents I edit now that scream out for clarification, and the humble hyphen has been a godsend in making this painfully boring and headache-inducing matter easier to read. Also, I’m on mobile so can’t verify, but it looks like the author is using an en dash throughout his post when an em dash is called for.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Word and Google Docs inaccurately convert hyphens into en dashes In Word's case, and I think GDocs as well, it is a switchable autocorrect setting, that mostly (not perfectly, because you can't do it purely structurally without semantic analysis) does it correctly, not inaccurately, AFAICT. > En dashes are ugly bastards that have very little benefit. Word and Google Docs inaccurately convert hyphens into en dashes, and I never have gotten a satisfactory answer why. I used to see en dashes to connect a compound modifier to yet another word, like “billiard-ball–size hail” (that’s an en dash between “ball” and “size”), but I could never trace this “rule” to any style guide. I’m fairly sure that the Chicago Manual specifies this rule (my older Chicago Manual isn’t handy, and the non-exhaustive information in the public FAQ [0] doesn’t cover it, though it does address the closely-related rule on using an en-dash to connect a modifier to an open compound.) > Another popular case was a proper noun connected to another word, like “New York–based author.” I’m pretty sure that’s not because New York is a proper noun, but because it is an open compound. > Computers require contortions to create em and en dashes They require a tiny bit of setup to make it easy, outside of the applications which already make it easy. > Also, I’m on mobile so can’t verify, but it looks like the author is using an en dash throughout his post when an em dash is called for. Some style guides call for an en-dash (usually, set open) in the places where the more common rule is to use an em-dash (usually, set closed.) [0] https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0002.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
- calibas 4y agoIt's even more complicated as there's an additional near-identical character in Unicode. Copied from Wikipedia: - is a hyphen-minus (ASCII 2D, Unicode 002D), normally used as a hyphen, or in math expressions as a minus sign – is an en dash (Unicode 2013). — is an em dash (Unicode 2014). − is a minus (Unicode 2212).
- layer8 4y agoIt doesn’t help that you wrote it as a monospaced block. ;)
- lapama 4y agoThe M dash is now forbidden in several scientific journals, they think the N dash plays the same role.
- spruengli 4y agoIn traditional typography, the em-rule is optional and can be replaced by a (spaced) en-rule. In TeX, en-rules are represented by two hyphens (--) and the em-rule by three (---). This is always approriate except in typeset documents (i.e. PDFs produced by TeX). Either you typeset something or you don't.
- ilyt 4y agoSooo many broken CLI commands because of wordpress (and few other equally broken tools) replacing -- with retarded dash automatically
- FrontierPsych 4y agoI've always known about the three, but the author is correct saying it's about availability. You used to have to go into the "special character" pop up, click on the n- or m-dash, go back to the document and paste it in. In more formal documents, maybe I'd do that, but most of the time it is just a big pain in the ass, and most people don't know the difference, so why bother. I do use the space dash space now for the n-dash. But where is the m-dash??? Usually under the "Special Characters" option I went into Tools menu to check if Special Characters is there...nope. Format menu choice?? Nope. Insert? Ah! There it is...after having to look through each of the above very slowly to see if the Special Character option is there. Now I have to look at the characters - there used to be very few special characters and you could find the m-dash. Now there are thousands of special characters and I don't have the time to look through them all. So now I have to go to the help documentation to search for the m-dash. OK, on in the help search box, nothing comes up under "m dash," "m-dash," "em-dash," or "em dash." Not even showing up under "dash." Fuck. OK, so now I have to go the ASCII table to find the ASCII decimal code. I found it - it is ASCII code for m-dash is 151, but how do I put that in the document??? I search online help - no help. I go back to the Special Characters option under (Insert menu. OH! There's a search box on top. I type in "m dash" THERE IT IS!! So I had to go through all that, just to find the m-dash. Why? Sheesh, what a nosebleed. You might say, "Of course, why didn't you do that in the first place?" Because 1) I'm an imperfect being, and 2) I've used all of those other ways before - I didn't start on computers in the last 5 years, I've gone through a lot of changes so I know a lot of ways to do the same thing. And from app to app, some still work one way way, some not. I didn't do my old standby, though. That would have been my next step — just go to Google search, type in m-dash as I'll always find it there, then just copy and paste the m-dash. That almost always works. Why didn't I do that first just now? Because I just wanted do it within the word processor, because that's the way it "should" be. And eventually was, after much work. So, fuck all the special characters. I just use commonly understood equivalents if I can. But, the point is that I've always know the difference between all three, it's just — why even bother? It's a colossal pain in the ass.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoSemicolons; forever!
- krupan 4y agoI promise you, differentiating these three absolutely does not matter
- LoganDark 4y agoAwesome. I've been using em-dashes ever since I've been able to type them (and sometimes before with things like — in Markdown/HTML-supporting contexts). PowerToys Quick Accent finally added en- and em-dashes, and I've enjoyed being able to type them anywhere without having to sacrifice my clipboard.
- jll29 4y agoThings are easy in LaTeX: - -- --- Common mistake: use -- not - for ranges of page numbers in *.bib files!
- ajl666 4y ago[dead]
- taeric 4y agoIt isn't that punctuation doesn't matter; however, non phoneme based typographical elements are really hard to defend. Worse, characters that are not present on the vast majority of input mechanisms? Really? This is the line people are going to draw in the hopes of not dying?
- InCityDreams 4y agoI wish that MS Office - if I use a dash on line one of some work - like this, the second line's dash is completely different (even when using columns. So, I really don't trouble myself with the whole idea of "The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-typographic balance: ".
- docmars 4y agoWhen I learned the uses of the three dashes back in design school, I felt like I had learned some new English superpowers -- and the rules are easy to remember, too. It's silly to me that some folks find it cumbersome, rather than an opportunity to be more precise in their writing, not to mention, more aesthetic.
- phlakaton 4y agoI don't think it's so much a matter as en-dash breaking the rules and em-dash following them. Robert Bringhurst argues, in Elements of Typographic Style, that em-dash is one of several Victorian innovations that he feels impede the flow of text, and en-dash (with spaces) is a more modern, typographically balanced alternative. I conclude there are therefore two different rules you can choose from (as in many points of style) and I – a hacker, artist, and typographic enthusiast – picked the one I like best. Though I revert to em-dash when parodying Emily Dickinson—as one should—
- plaguepilled 4y agoDidn't realise this upset grammar nerds -— thanks for the inspiration :)
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