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August 20, 2008
 
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When
Should I Use a Dash or a Hyphen?
by
J.D. Miller, staff writer —
W
 hat most of us know about the use of dashes dates back to our use of typewriters.
Our writing classes in high school probably didn't touch on the subject
which accounts for some of the confusion. There are different guidelines
for different dashes and hyphens and, in short, here's what they are:
Hyphens
Hyphens are those small little dashes that exist between hyphenated
words (vector-drawing, for example) or when a word is hyphenated for the purpose
of breaking a long word at the end of a line. The character key is located near
the delete key on your keyboard.
En Dashes
En Dashes are the parts of punctuation which indicate a duration. Usually it's
a duration of time (9:00 – 5:00, Monday – Thursday) but they can also
be used for other purposes as well (Boston – Los Angeles route). The rule
is that you use an en dash in place of the word "to." The en dash gets
its name from being the same width as that of a capital "N." An en dash
can be created on the Macintosh by pressing the hyphen and the option keys on
the keyboard. It can be found by pressing the control key with the minus symbol
on the numeric keypad on the Windows platform.
 Em
Dashes
Em Dashes are longer than en dashes which is appropriate since they are used for
different purposes. Em dashes are typically used in place of colons and parenthesis
— they indicate a change in thought. The equivalent on an old-fashioned typewriter
was to use two hyphens together (--). But, since em dashes are available, two
hyphens are no longer correct in correspondence. The em dash was named because
it occupies the same amount of space as a capital "M." You can find
the em dash on the Macintosh keyboard by pressing the hyphen key with the shift
and option keys. It can be found by pressing the control key and alt key with
the minus symbol on the numeric keypad on the Windows platform.
Give me some space
As far as spacing around these dashes, there is no need for
spaces around plain-old hyphens. There is a disagreement on whether you
should put a space on either side of an en dash or an em dash. Most people
feel that there shouldn't be spaces but I think that it looks far nicer
with additional spaces around them ( as you can see in this article).
However you choose to go, be consistent throughout your documents and
use the correct dash for your purposes. 
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