Hooo!
Punctuation: who really cares about it?
You still get what I'm saying even if my
comma's not quite right, right? And what
about these things--they don't even look
like different marks! Look, we get it:
there are a lot of fiddly punctuation
rules that just don't seem that
important in the grand scheme of things.
But, when the stakes are high the
smallest errors can have a big impact. It
even turns out that the differences
between these little guys can matter.
Hi! I'm Bianca from the OWL, and today
we're going to talk about some of the
more obscure punctuation marks out there.
Specifically, we're going to talk about
when to use hyphens, en dashes, and em
dashes. You can tell the difference
between these three marks by their
length. Hyphens are the shortest, while en
dashes are about the width of a capital
N, and em dashes are the width of a
capital M, which is how they got their
names. Their uses also are different.
Hyphens are used to join related words
together, including compound adjectives
like bicycle-friendly campus,
numbers like forty-two, or compound nouns like
well-being. You can also use a hyphen to
indicate a repeated part of a list, like
in "get out your one-, two-, and three-cup
bowls," or to separate a prefix in a word,
like in "pre-socratic."
[Music]
Today, we tend to collapse hyphens (email
used to be e-mail, for instance) so
many of the older forms of hyphenated
words like co-operate are now written
without hyphens: cooperate. En dashes are
far less common than the hyphen. Their main
use today is in separating ranges of
numbers
(Purdue beat IU 28–21), times (I have
class 10:30–11:20), words in a conflict or
connection
(the Lafayette–Indianapolis shuttle), or
occasionally long compound adjectives
(Purdue Pete–like eyes)
[Horror]
In many documents, the en dash is replaced
with a hyphen in these situations because
there's no en dash on a keyboard. The em
dash is what most word processors give you
automatically when you type two hyphens together.
Instead of separating connected words
like a hyphen, the em dash separates connecting
phrases in a sentence. Sometimes, like in
newspapers following AP style, with space
around it, and sometimes not. It indicates
a pause longer than a comma but shorter
than a period or semicolon, and it
usually brackets extra aside phrases
like in, "My cat--who's really the
handsomest boy you ever did see--is
named Finn." Em dashes can take the place
of parentheses, commas, or colons in many
instances, but since the dash is more
noticeable, it means the content within
dashes or after a single dash will be
more emphasized than if you use the
parentheses, comma or colon.
Like I mentioned earlier, language and
punctuation rules change over time.
Today, the difference between a hyphen and an
en dash isn't usually going to matter very
much.
Many modern readers might not even
notice the difference. But, if the stakes
are high, or if you just want to come
across as the most "dashing" person in the
party, it doesn't hurt to remember the
minor details.
I've been Bianca with the Purdue OWL.
Thanks for watching!
[Music]