En-dash, Em-dash, and the NBSP
See the difference in the length of the following three dashes?
- hyphen, Shorty McShort
– en-dash, elegant and distinguished
— em-dash, love you longtime
Even in that last sentence, I used an em-dash! Let me explain the differences between the different dashes and when is the appropriate circumstances to use them.
First, though, let me say this: I think it is a common desire among most people to be understood. It can be immensely frustrating when other people don't grasp what we are trying to say ~or~ misunderstand what we say and jump to conclusions other than we intended. Yet, our writing can easily be misinterpreted if we are not careful with our wording, spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
I recall reading an ad on FB-Marketplace last year where a woman was trying to sell something. However, her ad was so poorly written, and rife with errors in spelling and grammar, that even after reading the ad five times, I still had no clue what she was trying to sell. No one else must have understood, either, because she re-posted the same ad a few days later and still garnered no interest at all.
People who sincerely care about being understood will never become agitated when errors are cited in their work. Those who do are either insecure about their own lack of knowledge, simply lazy, or perhaps don't really care to be understood. Personally, I appreciate when people catch something I missed and give me an opportunity to correct it. Hopefully, this post will assist those who truly care about presentation and clarity, and give you some alternatives to make your writing even easier to comprehend by anyone! 😊
The Hyphen -
As stated previously, this punctuation mark is on modern keyboards, so it is the most-used of all the dashes. It is also the shortest of all the dashes. Hyphens are used to join two closely related words, or words that should work together to form a single concept. Examples include: one-third, all-inclusive, and one-of-a-kind. Technically, the hyphen should only be used to link words in this manner. Even the word "hyphen" belies this intent, as the word comes from the Greek huphen which means "together." If we wish to link numbers, the en-dash is a better option.
The En-Dash –
The en-dash is so named because it is the width of the letter "n" in typesetting work and font design. The en-dash is helpful when writing a range of numbers, such as referencing multiple pages of a document (pages 17–23 to mean: all of the pages from 17 through 23). It is also helpful when referencing a range of other things, such as months. As expressed by the University of Chicago's publication "The Chicago Manual of Style:"
The en dash connects things that are related to each other by distance, as in the May–September issue of a magazine; it’s not a May-September issue, because June, July, and August are also ostensibly included in this range.
Another interesting example given by the "The Chicago Manual of Style" involves the discussing of events prior to World War II. In this example, "World War II" is a compound noun which carries a significance of its own when the noun-turned-adjective "World" and the noun "War" and the ordinal "II" are used in sequence. If something happened prior to World War II, then the prefix "pre–" can be appended. However, if that prefix contains a hyphen, it would imply "pre-World," as in before the world existed. But, using the en-dash, the significance is shown to extend further to include the entire noun phrase: pre–World War II. In this example using the phrase "World War II," the distinction might seem trite, but in less common nominal phrases, it can certainly prevent someone from comprehending what is meant.
⭐️ You can get an en-dash by typing –
within the body of your text where you wish the en-dash to be. NOTE: You will only see the en-dash when the code is rendered on a web page like your Steemit blog, etc.! You can also copy/paste it from this post and use it where you wish!
The Em-Dash —
The em-dash is the longest of the three, and so called because it is as wide as the letter "m" in typography. The em-dash is useful for delineating appositives or for providing breaks and supplemental information to a sentence. For example:
Despite what "The Chicago Manual of Style" says about not placing a space on each side of the em-dash, I feel that it looks much better to use a space on each side, so that is my own personal style. I think it looks much cleaner, and hope others will follow suit.
It is also useful when a character in a story has been interrupted in mid-sentence, as in: "I didn't mean to cause troub—".
The em-dash or the en-dash can also be handy in bulleted lists to create items beneath the bullets:
● Category (A)
— Item 1
— Item 2
— Item 3
● Category (B)
— Item 1
— Item 2
⭐️ You can get an em-dash by typing —
within the body of your text where you wish the em-dash to be. NOTE: You will only see the em-dash when the code is rendered on a web page like your Steemit blog, etc.! You can also copy/paste it from this post and use it where you wish!
It has become acceptable when writing on the Internet to use two hyphens in sequence -- like this -- to simulate an em-dash. That might be acceptable in casual circumstances, but I would definitely advise against it for formal work, or work which might be published.
The NBSP
"NBSP" stands for: Non-Breaking SPace, and is implemented by placing the code
at the desired place within your text. It must be preceded by the ampersand and terminated with the semicolon. A Non-Breaking SPace can very useful in a couple of circumstances.
First, when one uses the em-dash in the middle of a sentence, it is undesirable for it to fall at the beginning of a line when word-wrap is implemented. So, when text wraps within an article (like a Steemit post, for instance), placing a non-breaking space prior to an em-dash will prevent it from standing alone at the beginning of a line. As an example, consider the following, without the NBSP:
John goes to the football stadium — his favorite place to be
— after he leaves work on Fridays.
See how the em-dash looks peculiar at the beginning of the second line, as the word-wrapping takes effect? To fix that, we only need to insert the code for a NBSP before the em-dash, so it looks like this: —
The resulting output would then become:
John goes to the football stadium — his favorite place to
be — after he leaves work on Fridays.
Another helful use of NBSP is to force spaces where they would otherwise not be. Notice that the above sentence about John is indented from the left side more than the other paragraphs? I accomplished that by adding four NBSP codes, one after the other, as in
at the beginning of the line.
Rather creative use of this trick can be seen in this post, where I indented each line a little more to create a diagonal slant effect. In fact, it was at the suggestion of @enginewitty that I am writing this post to explain how I did that! I just didn't intend for two months to lapse before I was motivated-enough, and remembered, to write this... LOL! 🤔
In Summary...
Here is a sentence using all of the new things we learned today:
So now, everyone knows 1–4 new punctuation tricks — which are totally awesome — to make your Steemit posts stand head-and-shoulders above the rest!
![dottedline.png](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/thekittygirl/JBkywHFc-dottedline.png)
![ThanksForReading.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmX5PVZYtzAT5eTGf4ZQ5KWtQ2VV1thxEpggdobVRfgWNp/ThanksForReading.png)
SOURCES
1 BrightHub.com: En Dash vs. Em Dash: When to Use Each
2 University of Chicago: "The Chicago Manual of Style"
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Hi thekittygirl,
Visit curiesteem.com or join the Curie Discord community to learn more.
Thank you so very much for you comment and upvote! 😊
Great post. I learned something that I have never really given any thought to. I am one of those who just use the hyphen without thinking about it.
Thank you for such an educational article and the first image to lure us in!!! I was quite ignorant towards the usages of the different types of hyphens and yeah I thought they were all the same, oops! Wouldn't have known their differences, if not because of you. Congrats on being curied too. Your article so deserves that, @thekittygirl :)
I do hope that no one eats poor grandma :D
Thank you for such an educational article. To be honest, before this, a dash was just a dash to me no matter how it looked. I will be keeping more attention from now on.
This is great of you to put out there to help everyone improve their writing skills! Something we could all use on steemit.
The grandma picture made me laugh.
howdy there thekittygirl! This is such good information to have, this is something that everyone can use and improve their posts with,
thank you!
I want to be loved like writers love em-dash!
And here was I wondering all these while why my own "hyphen" can't be as long as that of others or the ones o see in books.🙈 Lol! I have used hyphen like all the time when I was supposed to use em-dash or en-dash😀😀, I didn't know any better. Lol! I didn't even know they existed. Oh, well!!...
So I have spent like 5–6 years of my life doing it all wrong😀, oh no, its actually more than that, lol! Now, these people really do need to implement these two in the modern keyboard, its gonna help out alot, but in the meantime, I am just gonna use these codes.
Some rules are meant to be broken, like this one😉. Totally agree with you on it looking cleaner with the space.
Thanks for coming up with this, Kittygirl. It really is helpful and educative
Much Love — Audrey❤
Rock on Kitty, have to pin this in the tools for people. Love the let's eat grandma image🤣😂🙄
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Edit: Grats on the Curie!