Oh, the irony!
Puns aside, hyphens can change the
entire meaning of a sentence and are really the one form of punctuation that does
matter. Well, kind of. More on that later. For now, let’s review a couple
of real-world examples:
A man eating chicken is a man who’s
eating chicken. A man-eating chicken is a chicken who’s eating men.
A twenty-five-dollar bill (i.e., $25)
isn’t the same as twenty five-dollar bills (i.e., $100, in $5 increments) or
twenty-five dollar bills (i.e., $25, but in $1 increments).
Starting to get it? Good. At a basic
level, hyphens are used for connecting letters of a compound word (e.g.,
twenty-four hours, 100-meter sprint, and light-blue color). This concept
becomes more complicated with prefixes. Some word prefixes use hyphens (e.g., pre-existing,
self-employed, all-encompassing). Most do not (e.g., cooperate, antibiotic, and
unlikely).
The key to tell if you should use a
hyphen with a prefix is twofold: one, the ease of pronunciation and legibility,
and two, how long the term has been used—over time, most hyphenated words
become one because of audience familiarity with a word.
Using the previous examples:
Pre-existing uses a hyphen because the double-e of preexisting makes it more
difficult to pronounce. Selfemployed and allencompassing is similarly more
difficult to pronounce than self-employed and all-encompassing. To us,
allencompassing looks more like allen-compassing than all-encompassing, though we
have no idea who Allen is in this case. Jokes aside, despite co-operate being
better pronounced than cooperate, cooperate is the more widely used form of the
word because this term has been used for a long time. The way we see it: after
using co-operate for so long, people became lazy and dropped the hyphen.
So, what does this mean? Choose one or
another and just be consistent in your usage. Although we wouldn’t recommend
using co-operate, as long as you consistently use the term co-operate,
then you aren’t wrong.
With that out of the way, let’s talk
about an easier subject than English: math. Just kidding. Math is way harder.
Still, we need to talk about numbers. Specifically, compound numbers, which
will always be hyphenated. Example:
24 is a single number. Twenty-four is
also a single number. Twenty four is two numbers (i.e., 20 and 4).
Chapter headings? Same thing. You are
writing Chapter Twenty-Four. Not Chapters Twenty and Four. That really wouldn’t
even make sense to write the same chapter twice, would it?
Now, back to the hard stuff: the
hyphenation of compound-word adjectives. This type of hyphenation is dependent
on the location of the adjective—that is, does the adjective come before or
after the noun? If the compound-word adjective comes before the noun
it’s describing, use a hyphen. If it comes after, don’t.
Example, with balloons being the
noun and the adjective being the light blue:
Jezebel held the balloons, which were light
blue.
Jezebel held the light-blue balloons.
Example, with balloons being the
noun and the adjective being high school:
The bully, who was in high school, beat
up a wimpy nerd.
The high-school bully beat up a wimpy
nerd.
Getting the hang of it? Good. Time to be
confusing again.
Not surprising, there’s an exception to
the rule: compound-word adverbs (e.g., highly skilled worker—wherein, the
adverb highly describes the past-participle adjective skilled,
and skilled describes the noun worker). According to grammar
rules, if a word ends in -ly, don’t hyphenate. Why? Because uncertainty
in legibility and pronunciation is almost impossible. That’s it. That’s the
only reason.
Tom is a highly skilled worker.
Tom is a highly-skilled worker.
Most readers—if not all—understand that highly
and skilled are both being used to describe the worker. No further
clarification is necessary, so a hyphen isn’t needed. Doesn’t seem very
consistent with the other rules, does it? Yeah, it’s confusing to us too. So,
what should you do? Simple: whatever you think is best.
Does it truly matter if the phrase is
written as highly skilled worker or highly-skilled worker? No. We’ve
seen this done both ways. The audience won’t be confused in either case. Simply
pick whichever seems best to you and be consistent.
In fact, some authors completely get
around this by creating new words or bypassing hyphenation all together. Pierce
Brown, author of the Red Rising series, is known for avoiding
hyphenation by using a capital letter for the second word.
Sling-blade à slingBlade
Pulse-fist à pulseFist
Whisper-gem à whisperGem
But we digress. The hyphenation of compound-phrase
adjectives is slightly different. While the compound word pre-existing
uses a hyphen, pre–World War II economy technically uses an en dash.
Why? To remind the reader that pre- doesn’t only apply to World,
but to World War II—in this case, pre–World War II is an
adjective for economy. Technically, if we didn’t switch to an en dash,
we would need to write it as economy prior to World War II or add more
hyphens to be pre-World-War-II economy, which doesn’t look nearly as
nice and neat as pre–World War II economy.
That’s a weird rule, isn’t it? We agree.
That’s why we ignore it. In fact, we don’t never use en dashes in our
writing—just hyphens and em dashes.
Sounds blasphemous to completely
disregard a rule of grammar, doesn’t it? Maybe so. You just need to ask
yourself a very important question: is your audience going to notice or even
care about en dashes?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: it only matters if you’re
teaching English grammar and writing a book on it. If you are doing that, then
you probably shouldn’t be looking to us for advice and knowledge. Go buy
yourself the Chicago Manual of Styles and memorize it. It’s long and
dreary—have fun… but you won’t.
Considering that the majority of your
audience will not even know the difference between an en dash and a hyphen,
don’t worry too much about the little things. Just stick to consistency. Even
if that means avoiding the use of an en dash and only using hyphens. After all,
pre-World War II economy looks very similar to pre–World War II economy.
Who’s actually going to notice? Probably, only you. After all, we intentionally
used an en dash instead of a hyphen in the title, “Hyphenated. Non–Hyphenated.
That’s Ironic.” You didn’t notice until just now, did you? That’s our exact
point. Sometimes, what is technically correct in English syntax and punctuation
is pure BS and doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is telling a
good story. Focus on that before you start focusing on hyphens and en dashes.
So, now that you know the rules, feel
free to break them. After all, that’s what they’re meant for.
And remember to always ask yourself: is
your audience going to notice or even care? If the answer is no, then you’re in
the clear. Go crazy.
