.. 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.
By the same logic you might as well say:
"why are we even kerning fonts, who cares if there's a few gaps when i write »irl«."
The fact that using different dashes does encode meaning in a subtle sense does have relevance for semantics -- but that's, imho, almost secondary to this argument, as it's not as grammatically relevant as commas and. periods, for example.
The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-typographic balance:
- A longer dash to link words that belong together is visually perceived as an interruption and doesn't feel like those two words are one
- In reverse, a shorter dash when switching context -- or interjecting another idea within a sentence -- doesn't slow the pace of the text flow enough, and your brain will read/intonate it the same way as when linking words.
- And at last, either of them won't preserve optical balance when displaying a numerical range, as numbers are wider than a hyphen, but narrower than an em space, which would result in either insufficient visual separation compared to spaces following said numbers, or too much of an optical gap within an entity that belongs together.
That's the barebones set of dashes that are relevant for a balanced typographical appearance, not made up pedantic complexity to annoy people. Otherwise we'd be taking about half and quarter em dashes and the likes.
> you might as well say: why are we even kerning fonts [...] is paramount to micro-typographic balance [...] is visually perceived as an interruption [...] won't preserve optical balance
These are typesetters concerns, not writers concerns. They are all context sensitive tweaks to what amounts to the same glyph.
If the rules for each have as well defined contexts as the article suggests, then it sounds like something more suited to ligatures and kerning.
Full glyph replacement ligatures were not something initially supported by all font formats, so perhaps the fact that they continuing to exist as separate characters is more of a historical detail. It's something that could easily be added with new fonts though.
I’ve gone my entire life without knowing the difference and survived just fine.
It may not be entirely irrelevant, but it’s very close to it. A bit like saying your tie has to be knotted a specific way to look respectable. Very fun for the in-group, but completely incomprehensible to those outside.
Like, I’m not opposed to having a few silly things to learn just to separate those that can be bothered to pay attention from those that do not, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s actually relevant outside of that.
Thank you for the post. I still don't want to learn & spend mental energy on which of 3 different dashes to use, but now I do see why people would want to (and I think the reasoning is solid, even if I don't personally want to bother with it :) ).
You started by talking about kerning fonts, which is a great analogy.
Building on that - kerning is awesome because stuff looks better and I don't need to do anything for it to happen. Would it work to have my display system figure out which type of dash to use automatically?
Like, a dash inside a word should be short (under the assumption that you're linking the words together) and dashes with whitespace around it should be longer (under the assumption that you're switching context/injecting an idea into a sentence).
Why do we stop with hyphen, n and m dash? There are at least 30 different use cases, we should not reuse only 3 versions of some short line. Let's make 30 versions, one for each meaning. (cynicism)
It also looks like you’re drawing attention to something — the use of the double dashes — in making a deliberate choice to break from the norm. Whereas if you just follow the way most people use dashes - single dashes, not double - then it doesn’t really stand out, it just looks ‘normal.’ You’re used to seeing it styled that way. It feels different.
> In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.
The only French-speaking place I've seen em-dashes used in daily life was Québec. For some (good) reason, it seems administration took a lot of care in using correct typography. My voting district for example was Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (the first dash being an en-dash, and the second one a hyphen) and I was always amazed at how all communication actually used these two different dashes.
I can't imagine this level of care in French or Belgian official communication.
Others have mentioned using spaces with an en-dash or hyphen instead of an em-dash. Having used a typewriter -back in the day- I learned to produce text like this.
How I learned the Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money -rather than for art or pleasure- is really quite enjoyable.”
To the teacher I learned from this was a standard way of punctuating on a typewriter.
It‘s not unreadable, just a tad more difficult. And as others have pointed out, there are other ways of making it easier again than using a specific character.
But the real point is: The information transported in both examples did not change its meaning and will be understood by the reader / receiver in both cases. If it‘s not, it matters. As long as it is, it‘s pedantic.
A very common example is in threads for machined screw threads, e.g., 1/4-20. This is not a range of numbers spanning from 0.25 to 20.0, but rather a pair of numbers that define two metrics of a single thing, which combine to uniquely identify the thread.
Perhaps context is sufficient, but adding this to your examples gives us at least three scenarios where the single symbol would mean very different things with pairs of numbers: compounding, subtraction, and numerical ranges. If we add on the clause separation duties of the dashes mentioned in the article, we have four uses where a single symbol sits between two numbers and means entirely different things.
There's no shortage of mathematical notation and delimiting characters. Eg you could write your machine screws as .25+20i. Obviously you raise e to the power of your screw and you get a rotation rate in the complex plane, and a width of screw in the complex plane as well.
Compounding and numerical ops are basically never confused. Machine screw is the only one of these where its even plausible. Not that subtraction and range are ever ambiguous, but if they were just use "#1 - #n" to denote "the numbers 1/n being used as labels for some range of options, not as a numerical values".
All in all, we have plenty of characters. A minimal set of rules, minimal set of characters, rich in predictable patterns, is what makes for a good language. The existence of a whole slew of specialized characters, all basically indistinguishable and frankly unheard of to most, has to work hard to justify itself right to live on my keyboard. We have parenthesis, commas, colons both full and partial, brackets square and curvy, braces, slashes forward and back...More than enough permutations and code space for anyone's expressive needs. Why anyone would opt for more byzantine characters with more rules on top is beyond my imagination.
But apparently only insufferable pedants care about clarity. That's why we should stop using those pointless number glyphs too and just write them out in unary using hyphens. -/------------------------- is just fine.
Reminds me of this guy I met at a CTF. He decided that punctuation generally is unnecessary. What's the use of having so many different symbols if the only thing they denote is pauses between words.
so when he wrote something . he used only periods to denote pauses . no other punctuation symbols . no capital letters . some people were thinking that his periods stand for perl concatenation operators . i dont know if he is still doing this . i hope he stopped
actually i kinda love that . punctuation is semi arbitrary anyway . and this is actually much easier to read than the usual literary english full of semicolons and dashes . mimics speech much better too .
The article is not actually very pedantic - at one point, the author encourages us to break the rules - and I feel it has been offered in the sense of "printers have developed these variations on the basic dash, and if you choose to use them, it is probably best to use them in the same sense as printers themselves do."
In several significant computer typography systems, the notation for an en dash is a doubled hyphen (--), and for an em dash a tripled one (---). Notably LaTeX and Markdown (Pandoc flavoured: <https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html>).
In LaTeX I’ve been using \textemdash instead. I don’t actually know why, just, usually these sort of longer names tend to have some niche edge case they handle better.
em-dashes and parenthetical should be used sparingly so it isn’t too annoying to do all the extra typing.
It reminds me of the strong feelings about Comic Sans.
The guy who created it said something like, “If you love Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby. And if you hate Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby.”
I feel the same about this. The average person has about a billion things to improve in their writing before the “correct” use of different dashes should become something they think about.
Depending on the audience, I think the article is justified and gives a good overview. Just thinking of scientific papers, where sometimes you spend a full year carefully laying out the words. Being concise here helps improve legibility and is definitly worth the effort.
... with all due respect to folks who choose the hard and extremely frustrating academic career path, the inefficiency is so absurd that it truly only can exist in these gigantic institution-sized machines. (And in similar sized corporate money-makers.)
Most papers are fundamentally flawed, unfortunately, due to lacking sufficient information and data for replication, being underpowered (and not controlling for many factors).
It took decades to get to some minimally sensible standards (preregistration, conflict of interest declarations, awareness of the most common stats issues, power analysis), but we're still far from doing effective science.
Money is still handed out based on feels, hypes, name recognition (when it's not blinded) for laughably small projects, instead of focusing on establishing longer term ones and/or improving the actual science output (ie. data and hypothesis generation) of existing ones.
(Yes, of course, academia approximates this. Yes, yes. Everything's fine. We'll have a usable model of Alzheimer's any second now! Aaany second. Just let this new totally effective model of depression/obesity/learning/ME-CFS out of the door first.)
Arguably there's a place for both an em-dash and a hyphen. (For your example, a hyphen would be pretty normal style anyway.) But in a world where double quotes is a massively overloaded punctuation mark we probably don't need an en-dash at least.
TLDR; Using the right dashes is about the UX of text. If you don't care about UX of the reader your points are sound.
I however--as a typographer--strongly disagree. Typograpy is both about beautiful typesetting as well as making sure that the information contained in the text is understood easily.
The former is obvious to me. It may not be to you but that doesn't make your reasoning right.
As an analogy, there are quite a few people among my friends & acquaintances who cook occasionally or rarely. They usually share the trait that they care more about eating than how something tastes. Bluntly spoken.
They commonly have one kind of oil in their kitchen (most often suflower) and they use it when the recipe demands "oil".
Usually recipes specify what oil to use. It may say olive oil or peanut oil or sesame oil. They won't have these oils and they don't care.
Even though the effect of using a different oil is profound on many levels (not even only taste). If you care, that is. Same with the dashes. Text looks and reads very different when those different dashes are used correctly.
Which leads to the information part. Why do we have these different dashes? They actually map to spoken language.
A hypen is used to pull things together. A word can be hypenated (should be read as if the hypen didn't exist) or two words can be pulled together (making the pause between them shorter) "ever-changing" is pronounced differently than "ever changing".
An en dash used between points in time or space conveys that. A distance. The spoken pause is usually longer.
And finally, an em dash, like a comma, conveys an even longer pause between the words it separates.
I must say, truth is an absolute defense, and I'm certainly one to both value calories down the gullet crude and efficiently, and to not be terribly aware of what goes on in the font fetishizing circles (no disrespect). But I do understand information coding and that obsession over a good design. For me, its been subways and metros. I've been doing redesigns, obsessive recoloring, obsessively flipping between colors and shapes and other markers in an attempt to compress all that information down to the entropy limit. So I get it. I just don't get it with typography. Its all just letters to my viewing. Once the physical squiggle has been recognized for the abstract symbol it represents, the symbol and not the squiggle is all I remember seeing. I honestly couldn't tell you the last font I ever looked at, let alone if it had serifs or [insert typography feature, no really thats the full extent I know]. I can't say I'd ever noticed (or benefited from) a distinction between dash length. Any component of a letter under a certain length scale I mentally dismiss as likely printing dirt anyway. If it works for other people, well great and mad respect for it.
So I get it. visual design language serves a purpose. An important purpose. Its not the artful navel gazing outsiders think it is. Well, maybe some people are like that, but there really is objective purpose under it all. I'd even say I agree about rules for hyphens touching their neighbors or not. For compound words it should be a train-like-in-construction whereas in a delimiter roll like range of items it should go Boston - DC.
I just can't see having a whole dedicated set of minutely different characters fit for this purpose. I dislike it for the same reason I dislike lego sets that have a particular piece in them which isn't used for anything else in any other set and never will be. It ruins the elegance of the system. It offloads a minor design problem onto somewhere it doesn't belong (namely the character set). I want to know everything while learning as little as possible. Which is why I strive for encodings that express as much as they can with as few elements as possible.
If it were me, I'd just have '.' , '-' and '_' exist at mid, bottom and top heights and be done with it. Don't like my line length? make it whatever length you want either dotted dashed or continuous. Solves every use case, extremely composable, every permutation that should logically be there, is there. .,;:' notice anything incomplete? LHTIFE notice whats missing? qbhrnujdp damn that's frustrating. KRBPF where's the rest of the set?
I agree. I’m usually a stickler for punctuation and spelling, but I can barely tell the difference between these three hyphens. And that is when they are right next to each other. If they were alone in a document? There is no way I could know which is being used. If they aren’t easily distinguishable, I don’t see the point in using three separate symbols.
My takeaway wasn't that the article was being pedantic, just that it was being informative.
What's the point of punctuation? The point is that ambiguity exists in human communication. Where accuracy and precision are important — for example in formal communication — different punctuation marks and rules help prevent misunderstandings.
When engaged in less formal communication, or when the stakes of miscommunication are lower, these rules seem (as you observe) unnecessary. I think that insisting on proper syntax, spelling, grammar, or whatever else in an online forum like HN would be silly. But, internet forums aren't the entire world, and it is conceivable to me that there may be places where people need to depend on the meaning of their message being conveyed reliably.
I know the correct usages but often avoid them as it doesn't confuse the reader, but can break copy/paste usage. I can get by with ASCII hyphen/dash and double-dash for em-dash. I particularly dislike autocorrection of punctuation into more pleasing forms (e.g. smart quotes/apostrophes). This is one reason I tend to do outlining in Github issues more often than G.Docs.
Of course I'm mostly writing about computer/software topics and don't write for publications or a non-technical audience.
...and when the discussion on whether to use [mnxyz+]-dashes has finally been sorted we can start on which font to use to render these dashes, whether they should be proportionally rendered, how to handle ligatures with dashes, to RGBA or not to RGBA dashes, hinted dashes versus unhinted dashes, the big difference between the visually identical dashes in language A versus language B, et ce.te.ra.
The 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-..., 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.
I 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.
Made it 54 years without ever hearing about mdash/ndash/hyphen distinction. I've just been using the hyphen character for everything. Must have been absent that day in grade school.
This 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.
Reasonable choices. And a good description of a specific use for the em dash. But I think it’s a poor mind that can only conceive of a single use for a punctuation mark.
We could also use em dashes to signal excitedly running from one thought to the next—as if we’re just riffing on an idea—too fast to be interrupted—wouldn’t that be amazing?
Or we can use the em dash to slow us down—to pause and reflect on what we just said.
Or in dialog:
“Perhaps we can use it to signal an unexpected inter—“
“-rogation?”
“No, an interruption.”
“Yes, that would make more sense.”
“Oh! I just thought of something—we could also use it to indicate stunned silence.”
It is easy to conceive of uses, having a consistent style which conveys what you want to most any reader is another thing. If you had wrote all those examples without using the text to explain them the reader would have to stop and think about what you are doing and that is not a good thing.
I realized it on my own in an intuitive sense, my writing before I properly learned it shows this use but eventually I read some things on punctuation and fixed my naive use of the em-dash and other punctuation marks. I think "raising the voice" might be the old fashioned term but I can not remember the more current term or even if there is one, put some time last night into trying to find it but search engines are nearly useless and return page after page of sites conflating voice and tone or prescription punctuation guides which just list uses with no care about consistency in style.
Do 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.
Search engines seem to really fail here, they are just giving me more guides like the one here, I can not get them to give me anything about narrative voice beyond conflations of narrative voice and tone. You can see this use in a great deal of literature which uses the em-dash to introduce dialog in place of quotes, I believe Becket would apply but it has been years since I have read him so can not say for certain. Most of the authors known for their long complex sentences follow the conventions I outlined in my edit even if they do not use the em-dash for dialog.
>sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.
Write a single sentence which clearly and concisely includes exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question, self rebuttal and conclusion without following the "standard" I included in my edit. This is what allows writers like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences and by complex I am referring too meaning as much as structure, we can have great meaning with simple structures but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that. Sure that challenge can be executed as a paragraph but then it ceases being a single thought, it is a collection of thoughts and that is a very different thing.
I gave I look through my books and English is wonderfully ambivalent when it comes to punctuation outside of prescriptive grammars. The descriptive grammars largely (if not completely) ignore punctuation and focus on spoken language, even the Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language reduces punctuation "rules" to a single page and reduces hyphen/en/em-dash to a typographical convention and does not say much more than the dash is often used in informal writing to replace other punctuation marks. All we really have here is convention and consistency, can you meet the challenge I outlined without following the conventions I laid out? It can be done but it will be considerably more verbose than it would be following those conventions which is not a bad thing. Authors like McCarthy, Krasznahorkai, Ellman, Bernhard have all built their style around breaking those conventions (yes, two are translations when it comes to English but they break the conventions in their own languages as well.) Even Joyce breaks the convention and he does it within single works, switches between adherence and breaking, but not many have pulled that off in the way he did.
It is a really complex thing and part of what makes English literature what it is. We have conventions which have evolved over time when it comes to punctuation and we have prescription, but we don't really have rules unless you are writing tech documents or journal submissions. It comes down to having a clear and consistent use more than anything else and using every punctuation mark for any accepted use based on whim is not clear or consistent.
The problem is that the real world, human thoughts and other things that language needs to try to express are not "sane." So if we are to have a common basis for communication, the guidelines will tend to get "insane."
This 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.
> I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.
En dash is all over the place in personal/business writing, even just in email, thanks to Word and Outlook autocorrecting a hyphen to an en dash whenever it's between two spaces (rightfully in my opinion). If you've never seen it then that surely says more about what you notice than the content of what you've read.
That doesn't necessarily contradict your point – if you never notice the distinction then what's the point? But it's different from how I read the implication of your post.
(Funnily enough, without thinking, I put an en dash in the paragraph above by holding down on hyphen in the Android keyboard, and only caught myself after I did it.)
> if you never notice the distinction then what's the point?
Given there is usage of en dash in the wild as you mentioned, there's a possibility this may be a case of "you don't know what you got 'til it's gone."
Ah, 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.
> I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.
There’s an en dash in the first line of text on apple.com right now. There are en dashes, em dashes, and hyphens in the most recent press release on that site, all used correctly.
> This 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.
You have definitely seen them. All professional writing outlets, like e.g. the New York Times, use em-dashes, curly quotes, and other “typographic” characters that one is supposed to use in American English.
And newspapers in my own country follow the typographical rules. Even though no one uses it in informal communication on HN or FB. (Well, some on HN do.)
Except, I didn't write I hadn't seen them. "I've never seen them in business or personal writing".
We can discuss that I chose the word "seen", when I meant "noticed", but there is no doubt that I didn't write what you intimated. I have seen the dashes in formal writing and in newspapers.
A too-hurried reading is worse than not reading at all.
> THE EN DASH IS ABOUT AS WIDE AS AN UPPERCASE N; THE EM DASH IS AS WIDE AS AN 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 was traditionally the width of an uppercase M and an en half that (around the width of an uppercase N). Nowadays, this relationship doesn't necessarily hold: one em is equal to the font size (e.g., a 12 pt font has one em = 12 pt).
Ironically 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.
> 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«.
> in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”
This is also the traditional style in Dutch; it's what I was taught at school. These days many just use "upper quotes". You can still find the traditional style in books and some newspapers, but others have switched over the years.
In traditional Ethiopian you would use ፡ as a word separator, and ። as a full stop. Over time, people have started to "just" use the space as a word separator. There's some Wikipedia pages that mix both styles; for example on [1] you can see ፡ being used for the first three paragraphs and then it switches to a space. I rather like being able to see the evolution of language/typography on a single page.
Since you're quoting France, it's worth noting that there, double punctuations (?:!;) are preceded by a half-space (although in practice it's always a full space). Likewise, guillemets are surrounded by spaces (the space inside the guillemets might be a half-space, I'm not entirely sure). So it would be « Hello there ! »
An unbreakable half-space, to be pedantic (though in this case the pedantry makes sense: you don't want your punctuation mark to end up on the next line)
I 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.
Unspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us - software types.
Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not strictly kosher.
That looks well thought out. I use a QWERTY layout with similar reasoning applied to the Option/AltGr levels (but entirely different in specific placements) and I routinely type various dashes and quotes without conscious thought, any more than I consciously think about Shift-level punctuation.
In Spain the RAE (equivalent to the Oxford Dictionary) recomends «this», but you will almost never find it except in professional printing. They are not in the keyboard, so everybody uses "this".
It's a shame when technology fails us in this way - I just mean that computers are created to be our tools, and if we want to easily write «this», we can make that happen. If we only have people with this mindset (computers are our tools) in the right places.
There are many other quote styles - my language uses „these signs” (which we call "ghilimele", similarly to French "guillaumets").
EDIT: Seems HN is eating up the right signs... You can see them on Wikipedia here, they essentially look like two small commas: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghilimele
Oh, you quoted correctly, but the display of the right quotes is messed up. They should go from upper left bottom to upper right top, but instead show as upper left top to upper right bottom.
I 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
The pragmatic thing is to stay glued to the typewriter and then escape our nested strings with Unix toothpicks everywhere.
> 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
Typographic conventions go further than that.
In Norwegian it’s `«»` for one level of nesting. For nested quotes you are supposed to use something else. Maybe `‘’` (single quotes) for the second level and then `“”` (American English double quotes).
Maybe American English uses `“”` and then `‘’`.
In my opinion that’s not necessary. At least for text storage.
Part of my complaint about that is that although I think the different punctuation marks are great, using them is a pain because of keyboard layouts.
It's easy to find a hyphen (or something close enough) on your physical keyboard, but there's no em dash. OSes also make it a pain to automate even when they claim otherwise.
I go out of my way to use em dashes but do I think others would? No way. So is lack of use because of lack of utility or because of idiosyncrasies in keyboards?
Hyphens are great for some things but are too short to visually offset text.
The Mac layouts handle the dashes well in my opinion (quotes not so much). Option+‘-’ is ‘–’ (en dash), Option+Shift+‘-’ is ‘—’ (em dash). Option is equivalent to AltGr in the Windows PC world.
It 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.
Moving through text using Cmd + Left/Right arrow will jump over two words if there’s an em dash between them with no spaces. As a frequent em dash user that was very annoying, so I switched to adding spaces — to hell with the APA.
In 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. :)
Interestingly, 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.
I 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.
For 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.
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).
It ... 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).
For 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.
I'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.
Not 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.
I 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.
Is 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.
Oh 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…? - 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.
One 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.
They 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.
> Unification would very obviously be a terrible idea
Why? In the entirety of my school education I never heard a mention that different kinds of dashes exist at all and I still have no idea what their individual purposes are, yet it never had any impact on my understanding of text. Maybe I'm overlooking something, but if people have no problems with reading/writing despite "decades of misuse due to the bad unification", then it's not so obvious to me how unification is such a bad idea.
The 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:
Minus 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.
Awesome. 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.
For 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
I 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—
My 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!
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. 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.
> 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.)
> I’m pretty sure that’s not because New York is a proper noun, but because it is an open compound.
You are correct -- it's not because it's a proper noun. The rule I recall is that if a proper noun is also a compound modifier, the en dash is warranted. (I think this is in Chicago.) The example you gave from Chicago's FAQ is sort of the same rule but with the en dash coming at the beginning.
And the author of the original blog post caveated his use of the en dash (instead of the em dash), which I missed when I read it the first time, and speaks to your point of some style guides calling for an en:
> Choosing between the en dash or em dash is not a big deal. In my writing (as a manager corresponding with government officials and politicians, and also as a marketer communicating with real people) I use ‘space-n-dash-space’ instead of the em-dash – just to keep everyone happy.
It'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).
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: ".
When 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.
I 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).
In 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.
It 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?
Personally I’ve always preferred a minus sign closer, like the latter. While the subtraction operator looks better as the former. But I think this is just a calculator-ism that has infected my math syntax.
But especially for matrix inversion, the super wide subtraction symbol just looks awful to me. A little calculator style minus symbol is also nice because it’ll clear the matrix more easily…
ISO 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.)
This 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...
I'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.
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.
Does 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.
In 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.
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.
Not 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.
Everyone 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.
Oh 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.
I strongly disagree.
By the same logic you might as well say: "why are we even kerning fonts, who cares if there's a few gaps when i write »irl«."
The fact that using different dashes does encode meaning in a subtle sense does have relevance for semantics -- but that's, imho, almost secondary to this argument, as it's not as grammatically relevant as commas and. periods, for example.
The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-typographic balance:
- A longer dash to link words that belong together is visually perceived as an interruption and doesn't feel like those two words are one
- In reverse, a shorter dash when switching context -- or interjecting another idea within a sentence -- doesn't slow the pace of the text flow enough, and your brain will read/intonate it the same way as when linking words.
- And at last, either of them won't preserve optical balance when displaying a numerical range, as numbers are wider than a hyphen, but narrower than an em space, which would result in either insufficient visual separation compared to spaces following said numbers, or too much of an optical gap within an entity that belongs together.
That's the barebones set of dashes that are relevant for a balanced typographical appearance, not made up pedantic complexity to annoy people. Otherwise we'd be taking about half and quarter em dashes and the likes.
> you might as well say: why are we even kerning fonts [...] is paramount to micro-typographic balance [...] is visually perceived as an interruption [...] won't preserve optical balance
These are typesetters concerns, not writers concerns. They are all context sensitive tweaks to what amounts to the same glyph.
If the rules for each have as well defined contexts as the article suggests, then it sounds like something more suited to ligatures and kerning.
Full glyph replacement ligatures were not something initially supported by all font formats, so perhaps the fact that they continuing to exist as separate characters is more of a historical detail. It's something that could easily be added with new fonts though.
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I’ve gone my entire life without knowing the difference and survived just fine.
It may not be entirely irrelevant, but it’s very close to it. A bit like saying your tie has to be knotted a specific way to look respectable. Very fun for the in-group, but completely incomprehensible to those outside.
Like, I’m not opposed to having a few silly things to learn just to separate those that can be bothered to pay attention from those that do not, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s actually relevant outside of that.
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Thank you for the post. I still don't want to learn & spend mental energy on which of 3 different dashes to use, but now I do see why people would want to (and I think the reasoning is solid, even if I don't personally want to bother with it :) ).
You started by talking about kerning fonts, which is a great analogy.
Building on that - kerning is awesome because stuff looks better and I don't need to do anything for it to happen. Would it work to have my display system figure out which type of dash to use automatically?
Like, a dash inside a word should be short (under the assumption that you're linking the words together) and dashes with whitespace around it should be longer (under the assumption that you're switching context/injecting an idea into a sentence).
Your message is somehow undermined by your use of “--” in place of “—”.
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Why do we stop with hyphen, n and m dash? There are at least 30 different use cases, we should not reuse only 3 versions of some short line. Let's make 30 versions, one for each meaning. (cynicism)
Never really cares about anything that you're saying about how the dashes should work to imaginary group of people way into typography
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It also looks like you’re drawing attention to something — the use of the double dashes — in making a deliberate choice to break from the norm. Whereas if you just follow the way most people use dashes - single dashes, not double - then it doesn’t really stand out, it just looks ‘normal.’ You’re used to seeing it styled that way. It feels different.
An 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.)
Just add spaces. Sorted.
“Sometimes writing for money - rather than for art or pleasure - is really quite enjoyable.”
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> In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.
The only French-speaking place I've seen em-dashes used in daily life was Québec. For some (good) reason, it seems administration took a lot of care in using correct typography. My voting district for example was Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (the first dash being an en-dash, and the second one a hyphen) and I was always amazed at how all communication actually used these two different dashes.
I can't imagine this level of care in French or Belgian official communication.
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I disagree that the first example looks good. Both cases would be better with spaces, which kind of renders the em dash unnecessary.
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Looks better: “Sometimes writing for money — rather than for art or pleasure — is really quite enjoyable.”
Punctuation matters, but space -- the "zeroth punctuation mark" -- matters more!
The author does discuss spacing the dashes but is, given the overall point of the article, surprisingly noncommittal.
Others have mentioned using spaces with an en-dash or hyphen instead of an em-dash. Having used a typewriter -back in the day- I learned to produce text like this.
How I learned the Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money -rather than for art or pleasure- is really quite enjoyable.”
To the teacher I learned from this was a standard way of punctuating on a typewriter.
The "unreadable" sample is very much readable. We can all read it. No one is tripping up trying to figure out what a "money-rather" is.
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It‘s not unreadable, just a tad more difficult. And as others have pointed out, there are other ways of making it easier again than using a specific character. But the real point is: The information transported in both examples did not change its meaning and will be understood by the reader / receiver in both cases. If it‘s not, it matters. As long as it is, it‘s pedantic.
Wouldn't the alternative rather be to use commas there, not a hyphen?
"Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable."
In your head, do you read those differently?
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Also in Portugal, just use parenthesis (like when you would insert an idea into a sentence) and it still reads fine.
> In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.
French uses em-dashes ("tiret cadratin") or en-dashes ("tiret semi-cadratin") for dialogue. Like so:
– bonjour, dit-elle, comment allez vous?
– bonsoir, repondit-on. Ça va ça vient, et vous?
– bien
I use em-dashes and parentheses somewhat differently but you can mostly substitute the latter for the former.
Right, the dash length seems more of an aesthetic choice, like a drop cap or something.
I just use commas or parens.
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Of course, we do use compound numbers in English.
A very common example is in threads for machined screw threads, e.g., 1/4-20. This is not a range of numbers spanning from 0.25 to 20.0, but rather a pair of numbers that define two metrics of a single thing, which combine to uniquely identify the thread.
Perhaps context is sufficient, but adding this to your examples gives us at least three scenarios where the single symbol would mean very different things with pairs of numbers: compounding, subtraction, and numerical ranges. If we add on the clause separation duties of the dashes mentioned in the article, we have four uses where a single symbol sits between two numbers and means entirely different things.
There's no shortage of mathematical notation and delimiting characters. Eg you could write your machine screws as .25+20i. Obviously you raise e to the power of your screw and you get a rotation rate in the complex plane, and a width of screw in the complex plane as well.
Compounding and numerical ops are basically never confused. Machine screw is the only one of these where its even plausible. Not that subtraction and range are ever ambiguous, but if they were just use "#1 - #n" to denote "the numbers 1/n being used as labels for some range of options, not as a numerical values".
All in all, we have plenty of characters. A minimal set of rules, minimal set of characters, rich in predictable patterns, is what makes for a good language. The existence of a whole slew of specialized characters, all basically indistinguishable and frankly unheard of to most, has to work hard to justify itself right to live on my keyboard. We have parenthesis, commas, colons both full and partial, brackets square and curvy, braces, slashes forward and back...More than enough permutations and code space for anyone's expressive needs. Why anyone would opt for more byzantine characters with more rules on top is beyond my imagination.
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But apparently only insufferable pedants care about clarity. That's why we should stop using those pointless number glyphs too and just write them out in unary using hyphens. -/------------------------- is just fine.
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Reminds me of this guy I met at a CTF. He decided that punctuation generally is unnecessary. What's the use of having so many different symbols if the only thing they denote is pauses between words.
so when he wrote something . he used only periods to denote pauses . no other punctuation symbols . no capital letters . some people were thinking that his periods stand for perl concatenation operators . i dont know if he is still doing this . i hope he stopped
Writing is a recorded symbolic convention for the benefit of the sufficiently educated reader.
Eschewingallpunctuationforscriptocontinuaisofcourseppossiblethoughitishelltoread.Itisevendifficulttotypewithoutaddingthespacesreflexivelyifindasipostthis.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua>
There's a reason monks of old read aloud. It was about the only way to confirm the actual meaning of a text.
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actually i kinda love that . punctuation is semi arbitrary anyway . and this is actually much easier to read than the usual literary english full of semicolons and dashes . mimics speech much better too .
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Probably scored a. sweet gig. writing lines. for. Captain. Kirk.
The article is not actually very pedantic - at one point, the author encourages us to break the rules - and I feel it has been offered in the sense of "printers have developed these variations on the basic dash, and if you choose to use them, it is probably best to use them in the same sense as printers themselves do."
In several significant computer typography systems, the notation for an en dash is a doubled hyphen (--), and for an em dash a tripled one (---). Notably LaTeX and Markdown (Pandoc flavoured: <https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html>).
In LaTeX I’ve been using \textemdash instead. I don’t actually know why, just, usually these sort of longer names tend to have some niche edge case they handle better.
em-dashes and parenthetical should be used sparingly so it isn’t too annoying to do all the extra typing.
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It reminds me of the strong feelings about Comic Sans.
The guy who created it said something like, “If you love Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby. And if you hate Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby.”
I feel the same about this. The average person has about a billion things to improve in their writing before the “correct” use of different dashes should become something they think about.
Depending on the audience, I think the article is justified and gives a good overview. Just thinking of scientific papers, where sometimes you spend a full year carefully laying out the words. Being concise here helps improve legibility and is definitly worth the effort.
... with all due respect to folks who choose the hard and extremely frustrating academic career path, the inefficiency is so absurd that it truly only can exist in these gigantic institution-sized machines. (And in similar sized corporate money-makers.)
Most papers are fundamentally flawed, unfortunately, due to lacking sufficient information and data for replication, being underpowered (and not controlling for many factors).
It took decades to get to some minimally sensible standards (preregistration, conflict of interest declarations, awareness of the most common stats issues, power analysis), but we're still far from doing effective science.
Money is still handed out based on feels, hypes, name recognition (when it's not blinded) for laughably small projects, instead of focusing on establishing longer term ones and/or improving the actual science output (ie. data and hypothesis generation) of existing ones.
(Yes, of course, academia approximates this. Yes, yes. Everything's fine. We'll have a usable model of Alzheimer's any second now! Aaany second. Just let this new totally effective model of depression/obesity/learning/ME-CFS out of the door first.)
Without the pedantry, things can devolve to violence. Panda bears with machine guns. Horrible stuff.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Title
> pointless rules for insufferable pedants to power trip over
The perfect topic for HN!
Arguably there's a place for both an em-dash and a hyphen. (For your example, a hyphen would be pretty normal style anyway.) But in a world where double quotes is a massively overloaded punctuation mark we probably don't need an en-dash at least.
TLDR; Using the right dashes is about the UX of text. If you don't care about UX of the reader your points are sound.
I however--as a typographer--strongly disagree. Typograpy is both about beautiful typesetting as well as making sure that the information contained in the text is understood easily.
The former is obvious to me. It may not be to you but that doesn't make your reasoning right.
As an analogy, there are quite a few people among my friends & acquaintances who cook occasionally or rarely. They usually share the trait that they care more about eating than how something tastes. Bluntly spoken.
They commonly have one kind of oil in their kitchen (most often suflower) and they use it when the recipe demands "oil".
Usually recipes specify what oil to use. It may say olive oil or peanut oil or sesame oil. They won't have these oils and they don't care.
Even though the effect of using a different oil is profound on many levels (not even only taste). If you care, that is. Same with the dashes. Text looks and reads very different when those different dashes are used correctly.
Which leads to the information part. Why do we have these different dashes? They actually map to spoken language.
A hypen is used to pull things together. A word can be hypenated (should be read as if the hypen didn't exist) or two words can be pulled together (making the pause between them shorter) "ever-changing" is pronounced differently than "ever changing".
An en dash used between points in time or space conveys that. A distance. The spoken pause is usually longer.
And finally, an em dash, like a comma, conveys an even longer pause between the words it separates.
I must say, truth is an absolute defense, and I'm certainly one to both value calories down the gullet crude and efficiently, and to not be terribly aware of what goes on in the font fetishizing circles (no disrespect). But I do understand information coding and that obsession over a good design. For me, its been subways and metros. I've been doing redesigns, obsessive recoloring, obsessively flipping between colors and shapes and other markers in an attempt to compress all that information down to the entropy limit. So I get it. I just don't get it with typography. Its all just letters to my viewing. Once the physical squiggle has been recognized for the abstract symbol it represents, the symbol and not the squiggle is all I remember seeing. I honestly couldn't tell you the last font I ever looked at, let alone if it had serifs or [insert typography feature, no really thats the full extent I know]. I can't say I'd ever noticed (or benefited from) a distinction between dash length. Any component of a letter under a certain length scale I mentally dismiss as likely printing dirt anyway. If it works for other people, well great and mad respect for it.
So I get it. visual design language serves a purpose. An important purpose. Its not the artful navel gazing outsiders think it is. Well, maybe some people are like that, but there really is objective purpose under it all. I'd even say I agree about rules for hyphens touching their neighbors or not. For compound words it should be a train-like-in-construction whereas in a delimiter roll like range of items it should go Boston - DC.
I just can't see having a whole dedicated set of minutely different characters fit for this purpose. I dislike it for the same reason I dislike lego sets that have a particular piece in them which isn't used for anything else in any other set and never will be. It ruins the elegance of the system. It offloads a minor design problem onto somewhere it doesn't belong (namely the character set). I want to know everything while learning as little as possible. Which is why I strive for encodings that express as much as they can with as few elements as possible.
If it were me, I'd just have '.' , '-' and '_' exist at mid, bottom and top heights and be done with it. Don't like my line length? make it whatever length you want either dotted dashed or continuous. Solves every use case, extremely composable, every permutation that should logically be there, is there. .,;:' notice anything incomplete? LHTIFE notice whats missing? qbhrnujdp damn that's frustrating. KRBPF where's the rest of the set?
I agree. I’m usually a stickler for punctuation and spelling, but I can barely tell the difference between these three hyphens. And that is when they are right next to each other. If they were alone in a document? There is no way I could know which is being used. If they aren’t easily distinguishable, I don’t see the point in using three separate symbols.
> Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry.
My takeaway wasn't that the article was being pedantic, just that it was being informative.
What's the point of punctuation? The point is that ambiguity exists in human communication. Where accuracy and precision are important — for example in formal communication — different punctuation marks and rules help prevent misunderstandings.
When engaged in less formal communication, or when the stakes of miscommunication are lower, these rules seem (as you observe) unnecessary. I think that insisting on proper syntax, spelling, grammar, or whatever else in an online forum like HN would be silly. But, internet forums aren't the entire world, and it is conceivable to me that there may be places where people need to depend on the meaning of their message being conveyed reliably.
I know the correct usages but often avoid them as it doesn't confuse the reader, but can break copy/paste usage. I can get by with ASCII hyphen/dash and double-dash for em-dash. I particularly dislike autocorrection of punctuation into more pleasing forms (e.g. smart quotes/apostrophes). This is one reason I tend to do outlining in Github issues more often than G.Docs.
Of course I'm mostly writing about computer/software topics and don't write for publications or a non-technical audience.
The em dash is syntactic sugar for a brief digression in discourse.
...and when the discussion on whether to use [mnxyz+]-dashes has finally been sorted we can start on which font to use to render these dashes, whether they should be proportionally rendered, how to handle ligatures with dashes, to RGBA or not to RGBA dashes, hinted dashes versus unhinted dashes, the big difference between the visually identical dashes in language A versus language B, et ce.te.ra.
We have nice things that are free to use—I think we should use them.
There are different contextual requirements that can be served by specific typographic characters. I'd much rather see them used, than not.
I'd imagine most would feel the same‽
I_for⁃one−do–not-care—what--line-thing-ies–areｰused&∴I༌wish‑goodluck to those·that·care.¶
Agreed! Plus with my handwriting, who's ever going to be able to tell the difference?
Handwriting? We don't do that here.
agree. why many word when few do trick
The 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-..., 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.
I 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.
Thats so myopically HN... "I don't care about it, so it's probably not important and dumb anyway lol"
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Made it 54 years without ever hearing about mdash/ndash/hyphen distinction. I've just been using the hyphen character for everything. Must have been absent that day in grade school.
This 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.
Reasonable choices. And a good description of a specific use for the em dash. But I think it’s a poor mind that can only conceive of a single use for a punctuation mark.
We could also use em dashes to signal excitedly running from one thought to the next—as if we’re just riffing on an idea—too fast to be interrupted—wouldn’t that be amazing?
Or we can use the em dash to slow us down—to pause and reflect on what we just said.
Or in dialog:
“Perhaps we can use it to signal an unexpected inter—“
“-rogation?”
“No, an interruption.”
“Yes, that would make more sense.”
“Oh! I just thought of something—we could also use it to indicate stunned silence.”
“—“
“Exactly.”
It is easy to conceive of uses, having a consistent style which conveys what you want to most any reader is another thing. If you had wrote all those examples without using the text to explain them the reader would have to stop and think about what you are doing and that is not a good thing.
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I've never heard that perspective before about raising the voice, but I really like it.
What's even more interesting to me is that this contrasts with a parenthetical which I now realize lowers the voice when we read it aloud.
Did you discover that difference on your own or did you read it somewhere? Just curious.
I realized it on my own in an intuitive sense, my writing before I properly learned it shows this use but eventually I read some things on punctuation and fixed my naive use of the em-dash and other punctuation marks. I think "raising the voice" might be the old fashioned term but I can not remember the more current term or even if there is one, put some time last night into trying to find it but search engines are nearly useless and return page after page of sites conflating voice and tone or prescription punctuation guides which just list uses with no care about consistency in style.
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This is how I read them.
My mental model is that an em-dash is a parentheses that author was too excited to slow down and make vertical.
Do 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.
Search engines seem to really fail here, they are just giving me more guides like the one here, I can not get them to give me anything about narrative voice beyond conflations of narrative voice and tone. You can see this use in a great deal of literature which uses the em-dash to introduce dialog in place of quotes, I believe Becket would apply but it has been years since I have read him so can not say for certain. Most of the authors known for their long complex sentences follow the conventions I outlined in my edit even if they do not use the em-dash for dialog.
>sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.
Write a single sentence which clearly and concisely includes exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question, self rebuttal and conclusion without following the "standard" I included in my edit. This is what allows writers like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences and by complex I am referring too meaning as much as structure, we can have great meaning with simple structures but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that. Sure that challenge can be executed as a paragraph but then it ceases being a single thought, it is a collection of thoughts and that is a very different thing.
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I gave I look through my books and English is wonderfully ambivalent when it comes to punctuation outside of prescriptive grammars. The descriptive grammars largely (if not completely) ignore punctuation and focus on spoken language, even the Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language reduces punctuation "rules" to a single page and reduces hyphen/en/em-dash to a typographical convention and does not say much more than the dash is often used in informal writing to replace other punctuation marks. All we really have here is convention and consistency, can you meet the challenge I outlined without following the conventions I laid out? It can be done but it will be considerably more verbose than it would be following those conventions which is not a bad thing. Authors like McCarthy, Krasznahorkai, Ellman, Bernhard have all built their style around breaking those conventions (yes, two are translations when it comes to English but they break the conventions in their own languages as well.) Even Joyce breaks the convention and he does it within single works, switches between adherence and breaking, but not many have pulled that off in the way he did.
It is a really complex thing and part of what makes English literature what it is. We have conventions which have evolved over time when it comes to punctuation and we have prescription, but we don't really have rules unless you are writing tech documents or journal submissions. It comes down to having a clear and consistent use more than anything else and using every punctuation mark for any accepted use based on whim is not clear or consistent.
I think I'd like to fork the language and write one with sane guidelines.
The problem is that the real world, human thoughts and other things that language needs to try to express are not "sane." So if we are to have a common basis for communication, the guidelines will tend to get "insane."
This 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:
Yet, from another dash-hyphen pundit... [1]
[1] https://leffcommunications.com/2021/03/10/a-brief-history-of...
> I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.
En dash is all over the place in personal/business writing, even just in email, thanks to Word and Outlook autocorrecting a hyphen to an en dash whenever it's between two spaces (rightfully in my opinion). If you've never seen it then that surely says more about what you notice than the content of what you've read.
That doesn't necessarily contradict your point – if you never notice the distinction then what's the point? But it's different from how I read the implication of your post.
(Funnily enough, without thinking, I put an en dash in the paragraph above by holding down on hyphen in the Android keyboard, and only caught myself after I did it.)
>If you've never seen it then that surely says more about what you notice than the content of what you've read.
I'll agree with this. It also brings up the point, if punctuation isn't seen - is it useful? Probably not to me - maybe yes to others.
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> if you never notice the distinction then what's the point?
Given there is usage of en dash in the wild as you mentioned, there's a possibility this may be a case of "you don't know what you got 'til it's gone."
For 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
Ah, 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.
> I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.
There’s an en dash in the first line of text on apple.com right now. There are en dashes, em dashes, and hyphens in the most recent press release on that site, all used correctly.
> This 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.
You have definitely seen them. All professional writing outlets, like e.g. the New York Times, use em-dashes, curly quotes, and other “typographic” characters that one is supposed to use in American English.
And newspapers in my own country follow the typographical rules. Even though no one uses it in informal communication on HN or FB. (Well, some on HN do.)
Except, I didn't write I hadn't seen them. "I've never seen them in business or personal writing".
We can discuss that I chose the word "seen", when I meant "noticed", but there is no doubt that I didn't write what you intimated. I have seen the dashes in formal writing and in newspapers.
A too-hurried reading is worse than not reading at all.
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IIRC, both of these are more or less true:
> THE EN DASH IS ABOUT AS WIDE AS AN UPPERCASE N; THE EM DASH IS AS WIDE AS AN 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 was traditionally the width of an uppercase M and an en half that (around the width of an uppercase N). Nowadays, this relationship doesn't necessarily hold: one em is equal to the font size (e.g., a 12 pt font has one em = 12 pt).
obsessing about mundane details like that provides certain kinds of people with a mild feeling of control over their lives.
With what kind of telepathy did you uncover this fact?
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[flagged]
I'm against ped:antic-pun-ctu,ation)) not against pretty, practical and productive punctuation.
Ironically 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.
This article is wrong all over, from where I stand. Who uses semi-colon in titles???
> 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«.
> in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”
This is also the traditional style in Dutch; it's what I was taught at school. These days many just use "upper quotes". You can still find the traditional style in books and some newspapers, but others have switched over the years.
In traditional Ethiopian you would use ፡ as a word separator, and ። as a full stop. Over time, people have started to "just" use the space as a word separator. There's some Wikipedia pages that mix both styles; for example on [1] you can see ፡ being used for the first three paragraphs and then it switches to a space. I rather like being able to see the evolution of language/typography on a single page.
[1]: https://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%8A%A0%E1%88%9B%E1%88%AD%E1...
Interesting. I also see a few periods and a lot of colons with a line over them.
What do they mean? Just curious.
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Since you're quoting France, it's worth noting that there, double punctuations (?:!;) are preceded by a half-space (although in practice it's always a full space). Likewise, guillemets are surrounded by spaces (the space inside the guillemets might be a half-space, I'm not entirely sure). So it would be « Hello there ! »
Easy way to identify francophone writers. They always have a space in front of their colons, exclamation marks, etc.
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An unbreakable half-space, to be pedantic (though in this case the pedantry makes sense: you don't want your punctuation mark to end up on the next line)
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Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style.
The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
I 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.
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Unspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us - software types.
Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not strictly kosher.
And BTW, all of these can be found on the new AZERTY keyboard :
https://norme-azerty.fr/en/
(BÉPO version also exists)
That looks well thought out. I use a QWERTY layout with similar reasoning applied to the Option/AltGr levels (but entirely different in specific placements) and I routinely type various dashes and quotes without conscious thought, any more than I consciously think about Shift-level punctuation.
In Spain the RAE (equivalent to the Oxford Dictionary) recomends «this», but you will almost never find it except in professional printing. They are not in the keyboard, so everybody uses "this".
It's a shame when technology fails us in this way - I just mean that computers are created to be our tools, and if we want to easily write «this», we can make that happen. If we only have people with this mindset (computers are our tools) in the right places.
I'm sure that's a ton of fun for anyone trying to write a natural language parser. LMAO using the end brackets as start brackets and vice versa.
> trying to write a natural language parser.
I assume we're done doing that, that task is finished ;)
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Actually we quote „like this“.
There are many other quote styles - my language uses „these signs” (which we call "ghilimele", similarly to French "guillaumets").
EDIT: Seems HN is eating up the right signs... You can see them on Wikipedia here, they essentially look like two small commas: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghilimele
Oh, you quoted correctly, but the display of the right quotes is messed up. They should go from upper left bottom to upper right top, but instead show as upper left top to upper right bottom.
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I 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
The pragmatic thing is to stay glued to the typewriter and then escape our nested strings with Unix toothpicks everywhere.
> 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
Typographic conventions go further than that.
In Norwegian it’s `«»` for one level of nesting. For nested quotes you are supposed to use something else. Maybe `‘’` (single quotes) for the second level and then `“”` (American English double quotes).
Maybe American English uses `“”` and then `‘’`.
In my opinion that’s not necessary. At least for text storage.
Part of my complaint about that is that although I think the different punctuation marks are great, using them is a pain because of keyboard layouts.
It's easy to find a hyphen (or something close enough) on your physical keyboard, but there's no em dash. OSes also make it a pain to automate even when they claim otherwise.
I go out of my way to use em dashes but do I think others would? No way. So is lack of use because of lack of utility or because of idiosyncrasies in keyboards?
Hyphens are great for some things but are too short to visually offset text.
The Mac layouts handle the dashes well in my opinion (quotes not so much). Option+‘-’ is ‘–’ (en dash), Option+Shift+‘-’ is ‘—’ (em dash). Option is equivalent to AltGr in the Windows PC world.
What about using tilde for numeric ranges?
"The global conflict spanning the years 1939~1945 is known as World War 2..."
Tilde 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..."
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¿But which tilde? I'm a fan of typographical abuse of the ⁓ swung dash myself.
Ohh yes, reducing the amount of tasks the hyphen is used for helps as well
It 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.
in 180 characters: 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!
Or in Linux,
En dash (–): Compose - - .
Em dash (—): Compose - - -
https://tstarling.com/stuff/ComposeKeys.html
https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e...
Also on Windows: http://wincompose.info/
Of the three major OSes, Linux has the most intuitive way of producing special characters with its compose keys
To my surprise, no spaces around mdash is the general recommendation.
Moving through text using Cmd + Left/Right arrow will jump over two words if there’s an em dash between them with no spaces. As a frequent em dash user that was very annoying, so I switched to adding spaces — to hell with the APA.
True; depends on the style guide, but most opt in that direction. The Chicago Manual of Style is very firmly in favor of it.
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The alternative is usually en-dash with spaces.
> ⌥⇧-
What is this
macOS shortcuts. Option-Shift-minus
In 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. :)
"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.
Interestingly, 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.punctu...
It’s the server (probably WordPress’s fault), not JS. – is an en dash:
I 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.
For 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.
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).
It ... 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.
Although that allows “hypenated-and-autological”, which is very useful under some circumstances and in frontend.
Can 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?
For 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.
I'm just going to leave this here for you https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/firstable
I dislike that alot.
Literally noöne
Powergen Italia, anyone ?
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If you're using a compose key, the en- and em-dash are "--." and "---" respectively.
Personally I use "2-" and "3-".
I'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
Not 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?!
I 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.
> 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.
I'd get exactly zero discoint if I told my editor to ignore dashes. It's not where their time goes.
Another 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.)
A good resource for those of us who like TeX and LaTeX: https://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/latex.html
Is 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.
Oh 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.
Yeah, you often don’t know if it’s meant to be an ellipsis or just a typo for a single dot.
One 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.
This reminds me of one of Weird Al's better songs
"Word Crimes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
(These rules apply to American English, not British English. I can't speak for other languages and variants.)
If you have three lines that practically look the same, they should be the same character. Otherwise, interesting read!
They 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.
> Unification would very obviously be a terrible idea
Why? In the entirety of my school education I never heard a mention that different kinds of dashes exist at all and I still have no idea what their individual purposes are, yet it never had any impact on my understanding of text. Maybe I'm overlooking something, but if people have no problems with reading/writing despite "decades of misuse due to the bad unification", then it's not so obvious to me how unification is such a bad idea.
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The 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!
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Next up: why three periods for an ellipsis is bad and you should feel bad for doing it.
No, what's bad is having those 3 periods squashed into the space of 1 character..!
That's only the case for monospaced fonts.
Minus 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.
This advice is not only important for the visuals. Ignoring this advice also results in weird pauses for people that use screen readers.
Awesome. 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.
I also avoid em dash for being too big and prefer just using en dash when I would have used it
For 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
Another resource on the matter, which I really like overall:
https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html
I 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—
It's like a minus sign (-) but for "special" people?
A typographically correct minus sign is “−”, not “-”.
My 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!
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. 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.
> 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/H...
> I’m pretty sure that’s not because New York is a proper noun, but because it is an open compound.
You are correct -- it's not because it's a proper noun. The rule I recall is that if a proper noun is also a compound modifier, the en dash is warranted. (I think this is in Chicago.) The example you gave from Chicago's FAQ is sort of the same rule but with the en dash coming at the beginning.
And the author of the original blog post caveated his use of the en dash (instead of the em dash), which I missed when I read it the first time, and speaks to your point of some style guides calling for an en:
> Choosing between the en dash or em dash is not a big deal. In my writing (as a manager corresponding with government officials and politicians, and also as a marketer communicating with real people) I use ‘space-n-dash-space’ instead of the em-dash – just to keep everyone happy.
Sooo many broken CLI commands because of wordpress (and few other equally broken tools) replacing -- with retarded dash automatically
It's even more complicated as there's an additional near-identical character in Unicode. Copied from Wikipedia:
It doesn’t help that you wrote it as a monospaced block. ;)
I 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: ".
When 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.
I 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).
In 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.
It 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?
Which one of these, then, is for minus?
Good/bad news: It should be U+2212 MINUS SIGN like this: −1, which is none of the others. It looks better than hyphen: -1, doesn't it?
Matplotlib example: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/text_labels_and_annota...
Personally I’ve always preferred a minus sign closer, like the latter. While the subtraction operator looks better as the former. But I think this is just a calculator-ism that has infected my math syntax.
But especially for matrix inversion, the super wide subtraction symbol just looks awful to me. A little calculator style minus symbol is also nice because it’ll clear the matrix more easily…
Hyphen. You'll also hear it called "hyphen-minus"
"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;;;;;
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The M dash is now forbidden in several scientific journals, they think the N dash plays the same role.
The lack of capitalization (even on HN) is a regression far worse than dash mis-use.
They 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…
One of the main things I learned about writing during my philosophy degree...
Since 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.
ISO 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.)
This 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...
Great editorial reference: https://www.holloway.com/g/editorial-style
Dear Notion, Stop turning my double dashes into mdashes. My shell doesn’t consider them interchangeable.
A site that pulls on my heart strings.
Basically never use en dashes or em dashes because they are no longer colloquial.
Didn't realise this upset grammar nerds -— thanks for the inspiration :)
I'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.
Things are easy in LaTeX:
-
--
---
Common mistake: use -- not - for ranges of page numbers in *.bib files!
So basically, N Dash is a rich man's hyphen and M Dash is a rich man's comma?
The em dash: that character that teaches you you can't use 7-bit ascii anymore.
Punctuation matters in publishing. In comments however, errors become style.
Semicolons; forever!
I promise you, differentiating these three absolutely does not matter
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>"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.
This is now pretty much nonsense, because of technology every dash is a hypen.
Does 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.
> What do they look like?
> – hyphen
Hmm, that hyphen looks a bit long…
<p style="voice-family: 'The Senate'"> Ironic.
In 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.
the singular they with singular _agreeing_ antecedent has been in use since the 14th C. 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.
Not 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.
I don't see the link "they" and dashes. This seems like two completely separate matters / whataboutism.
Everyone 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.