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How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

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Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#331

Post by lxgr »

cyrillite wrote: post #309
lxgr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes. For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which m…

I have been doing this for purely aesthetic reasons my whole life. Style guides be damned, I hate connected em dashes.

The good thing about style guides is that they’re guides, not laws :)

That’s one thing I really like about English: There’s no central authority decreeing what’s right and what’s wrong top down, and it feels like there is some room for individual preferences and experimentation.

Very refreshing, compared to e.g. German, which has more than one semi-official authority gate keeping “correctness” in speech and writing.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#332

Post by dspillett »

pests wrote: post #254
BalinKing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This test feels biased by the fact that, like others have said, macOS provides keyboard shortcuts. For example, I'm only Gen Z and yet have tried for many years to use the proper dash characters in the right places, which is made much easier by virtue of being on a Mac. Of course, I guess it's entirely possible—even accounting for OS—that this test remains statistically useful. It makes me kinda sad that my (very muc…

Windows does too now via Windows+. which opens the "emoji keyboard" but you can switch to the "symbols" tab to see unicode. It does have multiple dashes in the quick access bar at the top or you can search.

I've used WinCompose¹² to add key composition to Windows for many years (after discovering the concept in Unix-land), which I still find more convenient than the other options I've tried (including the Windows Emoji keyboard).

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[1] https://wincompose.info/

[2] Though having checked just now, the sequences for en-dash and em-dash don't seem to be working. Perhaps one of my custom macros is interfering somehow… (it is behaving overall, ellipsis just worked as did the following diacritic and other symbols: áèîöūñ±⁰¹²∞¡¿‽π⬚). I'll have to poke at it later and see what is ary.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#333

Post by MindBeams »

crazygringo wrote: post #63
a3w wrote: post #11

> spans pages 128–34. Who omits the 1 from the second number?! That is aweful!

Who keeps the 1? You write pages 1,003–4, instead of typing out 1,003–1,004 which is just unnecessary. Works the same with two digits, or even three: pp. 1,899–902. This is standard practice and arguably clearer. I've only ever seen it done with page ranges, though. I'm not sure if it's done with year ranges? E.g. 1984–5? Or 1989–92? You work with page ranges constantly in academia, I just don't see year ranges much…

It's definitely standard, but in what way is it clearer? An abbreviation is never more clear than the full thing it abbreviates.

EDIT: I saw your explanation below, and you make a very good point.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#334

Post by MindBeams »

handoflixue wrote: post #235
crazygringo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're just not used to it. Quick, tell me how wide this range is, just as an order of magnitude: 285368737954–285368783645 Would be a lot easier if I only included the range at the end which had actually changed, wouldn't it? That's why it's clearer. Now obviously that was an extreme example, but it's also easier to see at a glance that 1,387–9 is just three pages, as opposed to 1,387–1,389.

If you format your numbers properly, you get "285,368,737,954–285,368,783,645" That's a change of about 50K, which isn't really that hard to notice. "285368737954-83645" is... well I have to assume somewhere in the 10-100K range? Hold on a second while I line up the digits again... uh... let me rewrite that to "37,954 - 83,645", okay now I can read it. No, that wasn't any easier. I kept getting lost tracking where in…

>"285368737954-83645" is... well I have to assume somewhere in the 10-100K range?

83645 is five digits, so certainly in the ~10,000 range.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#335

Post by phlakaton »

armedgorilla wrote: post #319
mmooss wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, good point, and an interesting question: What kinds of dashes did Dickinson intend? It's a hard one to answer: We could look at published Emily Dickinson books from the time, but did Dickinson really pay that close attention to or have that much control over the type? We could look at Dickinson's actual personal documents, but if they were handewritten, distinguishing dashes could be difficult even if there was i…

Fortunately we have troves of her handwritten documents; all of her poems were first printed posthumously. To me, she's using the punctuation as pacing or tonal markers as opposed to ligatures ("I'll clutch— and clutch— " vs "I'll clutch-and clutch-"). Many publishers style these marks as longer than normal m-dashes for that reason, which makes sense seeing as they are rarely used as asides. I interpret her marks— as…

Em-dashes have been the norm in every Dickinson poem I read, and I think it might have derived from the preferences of Victorian publishers, who I understand loved those long dashes.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#336

Post by dspillett »

mmooss wrote: post #142

Here's an easy, if not always precise way to remember: * Hyphens connect things, such as compound words: double-decker , cut-and-dried , 212-555-5555 . * EN dashes make a range between things: Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years: both connect not only the endpoints, but define that all the space between is included. (Compare the last usage with the phone number example under Hyphens.) * EM dashes break things, s…

> Unicode has the original ASCII hyphen-minus (U+002d), as well as a dedicated hyphen (U+2010), other functional hyphens…

Which can be fun when parsing CSV files from various sources. I've hit numbers with U2010 or others where you would expect a hyphen-minus should be. Presumably someone² has copied a negative number from a document where one of the alternate symbols was used, and pasted it into everyone's favourite data-mangler¹ which interpreted it as a string, and so on down the chain.

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[1] Excel. Sometimes a joy, sometimes the bane of my existence.

[2] It is surprising, horrifying even, how much manual manipulation of data goes on in banking, where you might naturally assume everything is more automated these days. Sometimes a laborious manual process done regularly is seen as cheaper than paying for it to be automated…

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#337

Post by MindBeams »

scottyeager wrote: post #197
efilife wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who downvoted this - how does a millimeter of difference in the length of a line matter?

Well-meaning can vary if you don't put spaces around your dashes, and a well—meaning writer wants to ease the job of the reader. ıt might simpıy not matter though, a miııimeter here and there, ı suppose.

Did you mix those up on purpose?

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#338

Post by MindBeams »

jeroenhd wrote: post #194
starfezzy wrote: post #110

We need a blog post documenting the ironic trend of people—themselves NPCs, actual human bots, just now realizing the em dash exists despite seeing it hundreds if not thousands of times before LLMs—flattering themselves by suggesting that anyone who understands the language at above a 5th grade level must be an LLM.

Taking knowledge of the three extra pixels that are "more correct" as some kind of indicator of intelligence is silly. Pretending you're somehow above them is just sad. Must be lonely at the top.

This thread is rampant with anti-intellectualism that deserves to be called out.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#339

Post by Finnucane »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #182
lxgr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes. For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which m…

I grew up in the UK, and have always used space, minus, space. The first keyboard I used was my dad's typewriter, and I don't recall it having any 'dash' other that the minus sign.

British typesetting style is a little different from US style in the way dashes are presented. In the UK, you might see a thin-space--en-dash---thin-space where a US typesetter would use a em-dash. Typewriter style generally follows books style. Since typesetters no longer use an extra space after punctuation, it's vestigial in typing.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#340

Post by rmunn »

krick wrote: post #308
lxgr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes. For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which m…

It's actually only your post that made me realize people don't normally put spaces around em dash. In French, Russian and a bunch of other languages proper typesetting is to use em dash as a standard dash character, and you always put spaces around them. So I did it in English as well, for many years now. (I also now looked up and found out that in Spanish, apparently, you are supposed to put space only on one side o…

I also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.
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