Style - Use Dashes Correctly

Ignore this worksheet! You probably don’t need it!

• Most people don’t know the real rules. They just use hyphen (minus key) for everything.
• However, sometimes Microsoft Word will fix something for you and get it wrong. If you’re interested in which one is correct, here are the rules.

Look at the length

• - - - (hyphen)
• – – – (n-dash)
• — — — (m-dash)
• ー ー ー (Japanese、doubleーbyte hyphen

Here are the rules

• Hyphens join PARTS of things, usually a number or adjective
  • in-depth
  • check-in
  • left-handed
  • family-owned business
  • pre-Christmas
  • self-motivated
  • twenty-one
  • 080-111-1111
• N-dashes show range “to”
  • Monday–Friday
  • July–August
  • 18–35 years old
  • 1975–1976
  • Japan vs. Argentina 5–1
  • Tokyo–Osaka Shinkansen
• M-dashes are hardly ever used
  • But for reference
    • they are like brackets
    • “This sounds wrong—it is wrong—but I feel penguins would make better pets than cats.”
  • In reality,
    • They’re only used in very carefully edited writing.
    • In the UK, even editors usually prefer n-dashes (There are three problems – 1, 2, and 3 – of which…).
    • Most people just hit the hyphen key. Word or Docs changes automatically to an n-dash. You only need to care if one of the pair doesn’t get fixed (“There are three problems – 1, 2, and 3 - of which…”)
• Japanese double-byte hyphen
  • Never correct in English text. Breaks spacing.
  • Also avoid double byte commas、spaces and （　brackets