4 ms·

How to use an en-dash and em-dash correctly? (BrE)

38 points by susam 2y ago

ycombinatrix 2y ago
This is good to know! I knew Word converted "--" into a longer line but I did not know what it was. I cannot wait to correct someone for using the wrong symbol. I am frothing at the mouth.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  In Google Docs, single/double/triple minus signs are substituted thus: single: unicode 45 (regular minus sign) double: unicode 8211 (en dash) triple: unicode 8212 (em dash)
fsckboy 2y ago
the article would be improved if they addressed the historical facts of typewriters, telegrams, teletypes, and ASCII instead of just presenting this view which is typesetting and unicode. (could also mention fixed pitch vs variable pitch/proportional spacing) typing on a typewriter or computer keyboard (without fancy multi-key workarounds), you can't distinguish between a hyphen and an n-dash (not to mention the minus sign); you use the same hyphen key for all those, and represent an m-dash with two--hyphens. That's the starting place for most people who will read this article, and that should be the starting place for the article, if only to say "everything you thought you knew is wrong, here's how typesetting works..."
- ghaff 2y ago
  And, to tell you the truth, while reliably using em-dashes in a word processor. I mostly just use hyphens on a mostly text site (or even an email) and don't bother with en-dashes at all. I guess I use em-dashes for formal/fancy stuff.
account-5 2y ago
The en and em dashes and my 3rd and 2nd favourite punctuation marks after the semi-colon. Recently I was accused of using AI to produce something because of my use of em-dash. I was able to show my use of the character going back years in my university work, long before recent AI.
- StableAlkyne 2y ago
  > Recently I was accused of using AI to produce something because of my use of em-dash Absolutely absurd of them to accuse you of using AI just because you used punctuation above a middle school level.
  - 0_____0 2y ago
    AI reliably uses em-dash, normal people writing generally do not, even if they know what they are, because it's more complicated to insert them. So yeah, there's a reason it's known as a "tell."
    - perihelions 2y ago
      - "normal people writing generally do not" You're generalizing inappropriately across cultural boundaries. Is the author of the OP article an abnormal human? Does "normal" mean "of average writing level"—is it now socially acceptable to ostracize and bully people who write well? Because, when you're accusing people of being bots (like the HN parent related), that's a seriously unpleasant form of bullying. It's dehumanizing, quite literally. (When you write with sincerity, you pour your own humanity into your words; what does it mean to deny that?)
      - 0_____0 2y ago
        This is an incredibly overwrought response. You could just as easily read the inverse of "normal" to be "exceptional," which in fact is how I meant it.
    - StableAlkyne 2y ago
chasil 2y ago
I actually learned this in a book for Xerox Ventura Publisher in the late '80s.
tlhunter 2y ago
In vim insert mode you can type `Ctrl+k - m` or `Ctrl+k - n` to insert them.
- kps 2y ago
  Fun fact: Vim ^K sequences follow RFC1345, but nobody else does.
  - benji-york 2y ago
    As a long-time Vim user I am very happy to learn this trivia.
- I_complete_me 2y ago
  Slight correction: m-dash `Ctrl+k -M` or, for n-dash `Ctrl+k -N`. What also works (though more cumbersome) are: For m-dash: Ctrl+q u2014 and for n-dash: Ctrl+q u2013 My vim set up requires Ctrl+q but probably it's normally Ctrl+v, may need to check.
perihelions 2y ago
On Linux you can use the Compose key[0] to type these without any friction. It's simply --- for the em-dash and --. for the en-. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
- Lammy 2y ago
  I can't live without this. I also use WinCompose on Windows and Karabiner Elements on Mac which I find vastly superior to the native special-character input methods of both: https://wincompose.info/ https://wincompose.info/ https://gist.github.com/tsibley/152bfa70deaf2a497155 https://gist.github.com/tsibley/152bfa70deaf2a497155
- pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
  Why bother when you have (Shift+)AltGr+hyphen, though.
  - kps 2y ago
    Many keyboards don't have AltGraph and many layouts use it poorly.
- benji-york 2y ago
  For the people that also use macOS: Option + hyphen and Shift + Option + hyphen.
7734128 2y ago
I'm in general opposed to the entire concept. One character is enough for all these use cases and having three, or more, separate characters is a bug not a feature.
- ghaff 2y ago
  As someone who does use em-dashes (and never en-dashes) I don't really disagree. Double quotes in particular are a ridiculously overloaded piece of punctuation. On the other hand em-dashes have some aesthetic appeal vs. hyphens or double hyphens as I would use on a site like this. (Even if I think there is legitimate debate over whether they should have spaces around them or not.) En-dashes? I was on the style committee at a prior company and I don't think we used them because it would have been another thing copyeditors had to fix every time.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    > Double quotes in particular are a ridiculously overloaded piece of punctuation. Pythonistas everywhere: how dare you.
- blindstitch 2y ago
  You don't have to use them if you want, and I would never bother in some throwaway internet comment where context clues work well enough, but they serve an important purpose in typography that date back to the invention of the printing press or before. Each of these typographic marks signals uses that greatly differ syntactically and linguistically. In another sense, these are building blocks of design, which revolves around subtle yet explicit visual cues. Giving the reader those cues eliminates ambiguity by unambiguously establishing the writer's intent. That in turn promotes visual flow, which is essential when typesetting something hundreds of pages long. If you ever find yourself in this situation, you'll be happy they exist!
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Next they're going to tell me that forward slashes and division signs are different
keane 2y ago
Related: https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688142
albert_e 2y ago
I don't have a great writing style -- it's too verbose and often has run-on sentences that seemingly never end. And I do use the en-dash / em-dash a lot -- probably incorrectly. All flaws aside, it would be very unfair of anyone -- much less any purported expert in AI -- to suggest that frequent usage of this punctuation -- irrespective of whether it is tasteful or not -- is a sign of AI generated text (or slop).
nayuki 2y ago
Additionally: * Use the minus sign /−/ (U+2212) when formatting numbers, because the default hyphen-minus /-/ (U+2D) just looks wrong: "It is −1 °C vs. -1 °C." Moreover, the correct minus has the same width as plus (− vs. +). * Rare, but use the figure dash /‒/ (U+2012) or figure space / / (U+2007) if you need a placeholder character that is the same width as a single digit. For example, "Guess the PIN: 1‒34."
OptionOfT 2y ago
There was a time where the man pages on Debian(derived) were being mangled by groff. Groff made a change that when an author typed - (hypen-minus), it would be empitted as ‐ (hypen). In order to actually display a hypen-minus, it would need to be entered as \-. We can argue about what is semantically the right way of displaying dashes, but because the majority of existing manpages don't properly escape the dash, this change broke searching in manpages. You couldn't do /--location (search, hypen-minus, hypen-minus, ..., <enter>). https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/ https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

38 points by susam 2y ago

This is good to know! I knew Word converted "--" into a longer line but I did not know what it was. I cannot wait to correct someone for using the wrong symbol. I am frothing at the mouth.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
In Google Docs, single/double/triple minus signs are substituted thus: single: unicode 45 (regular minus sign) double: unicode 8211 (en dash) triple: unicode 8212 (em dash)

fsckboy 2y ago

the article would be improved if they addressed the historical facts of typewriters, telegrams, teletypes, and ASCII instead of just presenting this view which is typesetting and unicode. (could also mention fixed pitch vs variable pitch/proportional spacing) typing on a typewriter or computer keyboard (without fancy multi-key workarounds), you can't distinguish between a hyphen and an n-dash (not to mention the minus sign); you use the same hyphen key for all those, and represent an m-dash with two--hyphens. That's the starting place for most people who will read this article, and that should be the starting place for the article, if only to say "everything you thought you knew is wrong, here's how typesetting works..."

ghaff 2y ago
And, to tell you the truth, while reliably using em-dashes in a word processor. I mostly just use hyphens on a mostly text site (or even an email) and don't bother with en-dashes at all. I guess I use em-dashes for formal/fancy stuff.

account-5 2y ago

The en and em dashes and my 3rd and 2nd favourite punctuation marks after the semi-colon. Recently I was accused of using AI to produce something because of my use of em-dash. I was able to show my use of the character going back years in my university work, long before recent AI.

StableAlkyne 2y ago
> Recently I was accused of using AI to produce something because of my use of em-dash Absolutely absurd of them to accuse you of using AI just because you used punctuation above a middle school level.
- 0_____0 2y ago
  AI reliably uses em-dash, normal people writing generally do not, even if they know what they are, because it's more complicated to insert them. So yeah, there's a reason it's known as a "tell."
  - perihelions 2y ago
    - "normal people writing generally do not" You're generalizing inappropriately across cultural boundaries. Is the author of the OP article an abnormal human? Does "normal" mean "of average writing level"—is it now socially acceptable to ostracize and bully people who write well? Because, when you're accusing people of being bots (like the HN parent related), that's a seriously unpleasant form of bullying. It's dehumanizing, quite literally. (When you write with sincerity, you pour your own humanity into your words; what does it mean to deny that?)
    - 0_____0 2y ago
      This is an incredibly overwrought response. You could just as easily read the inverse of "normal" to be "exceptional," which in fact is how I meant it.
  - StableAlkyne 2y ago

chasil 2y ago

I actually learned this in a book for Xerox Ventura Publisher in the late '80s.

tlhunter 2y ago

In vim insert mode you can type `Ctrl+k - m` or `Ctrl+k - n` to insert them.

kps 2y ago
Fun fact: Vim ^K sequences follow RFC1345, but nobody else does.
- benji-york 2y ago
  As a long-time Vim user I am very happy to learn this trivia.
I_complete_me 2y ago
Slight correction: m-dash `Ctrl+k -M` or, for n-dash `Ctrl+k -N`. What also works (though more cumbersome) are: For m-dash: Ctrl+q u2014 and for n-dash: Ctrl+q u2013 My vim set up requires Ctrl+q but probably it's normally Ctrl+v, may need to check.

perihelions 2y ago

On Linux you can use the Compose key[0] to type these without any friction. It's simply --- for the em-dash and --. for the en-. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

Lammy 2y ago
I can't live without this. I also use WinCompose on Windows and Karabiner Elements on Mac which I find vastly superior to the native special-character input methods of both: https://wincompose.info/ https://wincompose.info/ https://gist.github.com/tsibley/152bfa70deaf2a497155 https://gist.github.com/tsibley/152bfa70deaf2a497155
pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
Why bother when you have (Shift+)AltGr+hyphen, though.
- kps 2y ago
  Many keyboards don't have AltGraph and many layouts use it poorly.
benji-york 2y ago
For the people that also use macOS: Option + hyphen and Shift + Option + hyphen.

7734128 2y ago

I'm in general opposed to the entire concept. One character is enough for all these use cases and having three, or more, separate characters is a bug not a feature.

ghaff 2y ago
As someone who does use em-dashes (and never en-dashes) I don't really disagree. Double quotes in particular are a ridiculously overloaded piece of punctuation. On the other hand em-dashes have some aesthetic appeal vs. hyphens or double hyphens as I would use on a site like this. (Even if I think there is legitimate debate over whether they should have spaces around them or not.) En-dashes? I was on the style committee at a prior company and I don't think we used them because it would have been another thing copyeditors had to fix every time.
- sgarland 2y ago
  > Double quotes in particular are a ridiculously overloaded piece of punctuation. Pythonistas everywhere: how dare you.
blindstitch 2y ago
You don't have to use them if you want, and I would never bother in some throwaway internet comment where context clues work well enough, but they serve an important purpose in typography that date back to the invention of the printing press or before. Each of these typographic marks signals uses that greatly differ syntactically and linguistically. In another sense, these are building blocks of design, which revolves around subtle yet explicit visual cues. Giving the reader those cues eliminates ambiguity by unambiguously establishing the writer's intent. That in turn promotes visual flow, which is essential when typesetting something hundreds of pages long. If you ever find yourself in this situation, you'll be happy they exist!

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

Next they're going to tell me that forward slashes and division signs are different

keane 2y ago

Related: https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688142

albert_e 2y ago

I don't have a great writing style -- it's too verbose and often has run-on sentences that seemingly never end. And I do use the en-dash / em-dash a lot -- probably incorrectly. All flaws aside, it would be very unfair of anyone -- much less any purported expert in AI -- to suggest that frequent usage of this punctuation -- irrespective of whether it is tasteful or not -- is a sign of AI generated text (or slop).

nayuki 2y ago

Additionally: * Use the minus sign /−/ (U+2212) when formatting numbers, because the default hyphen-minus /-/ (U+2D) just looks wrong: "It is −1 °C vs. -1 °C." Moreover, the correct minus has the same width as plus (− vs. +). * Rare, but use the figure dash /‒/ (U+2012) or figure space / / (U+2007) if you need a placeholder character that is the same width as a single digit. For example, "Guess the PIN: 1‒34."

OptionOfT 2y ago

There was a time where the man pages on Debian(derived) were being mangled by groff. Groff made a change that when an author typed - (hypen-minus), it would be empitted as ‐ (hypen). In order to actually display a hypen-minus, it would need to be entered as \-. We can argue about what is semantically the right way of displaying dashes, but because the majority of existing manpages don't properly escape the dash, this change broke searching in manpages. You couldn't do /--location (search, hypen-minus, hypen-minus, ..., <enter>). https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/ https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]