Those darn dashes—which to use where?
September 30, 2006
Which dashes to use where is a subject of much annoyance and confusion to many writers. Most of us know that there are three common kinds of dashes, but how do we know when to use each of them properly? First, there’s the hyphen (-). The smallest member of the dash family, it’s used primarily for—rather obviously—hyphenation of compound words. If you follow this simple rule, you can’t really go wrong. It’s also used to separate numbers (such as in a phone number), or to separate letters in a word that is spelled out (H-Y-P-H-E-N).
