Can’t we all learn to use hyphens correctly?

(Originally published on Medium on November 19, 2019)

Hyphens: they’re the official punctuation mark of woke millennials. We indeed live in an age of compound adjectives like gender-fluid, gluten-free, female-identified, queer-adjacent, and so on, and as such hyphens are at a premium like never before.

It’s therefore about time people learned to use them correctly.

The most common form of hyphen abuse occurs when people use a term like “African-American” in noun rather than adjectival form and leave the hyphen in. As an adjective (as in “African-American literature”), a hyphen is in fact called for, but as a noun you don’t use it. Yes, you will see hyphens in nouns, but generally only in neologisms like U-turn or e-commerce, or in double-barrel proper nouns like Jean-Luc Picard, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Dallas-Fort Worth (or Spider-Man for that matter, because the Marvel universe loves hyphens — as opposed to DC Comics, which eschews them in Batman, Aquaman etc.). Otherwise you just don’t see them in nouns, and if you do it’s probably a mistake.

But this isn’t even the type of hyphen abuse that bugs me the most. My number-one hyphen pet peeve is one I see all the time when people write about spans of time, usually in a form like this:

Replacement buses will run between MacEwan and NAIT from 7 am-4 pm.

OK, let’s talk about this sentence for a moment.

Firstly, this usage requires an en dash, not a hyphen (and no, the word en dash does not require a hyphen). An en dash (–) is slightly longer than a hyphen (-) while shorter than an em dash ( — ), which is used to set aside a word or clause and adds emphasis. When talking about a span of time, the en dash takes the place of a preposition like “from” or “and”, and the mark should be preceded and followed by a space, as in:

Replacement buses will run between MacEwan and NAIT from 7 am – 4 pm.

That said, this sentence is still wrong. Why? Because you’ve got the word “from” ahead of 7 am. When you’re writing about a span of time like this, you have two choices: two prepositions or no prepositions.

• Option 1: Replacement buses will run between MacEwan and NAIT from 7 am to 4 pm.

• Option 2: Replacement buses will run between MacEwan and NAIT between 7 am and 4 pm.

• Option 3: Replacement bus hours of operation: 7 am – 4pm

By contrast, writing “from 7 am – 4 pm” is no different from using a single quotation mark or bracket, or using a single bracket and closing your clause with an em dash, or something similarly abominable. And yet I see this misuse of hyphens on a nearly daily basis. I realize I may be the only person out there who finds this particular form of sloppy punctuation as aggravating as I do, but I doubt it. It’s chronic. I see it on official signage all the time. It always seems to slip past spellcheckers. It’s rampant.

This is a much bigger deal punctuation-wise than the Oxford Comma, about which I used to expend a lot of mental energy. I no longer care if anyone uses it or not, as long as they’re consistent. But this rampant hyphen abuse needs to stop.

Only you can prevent hyphen abuse. For more on hyphenation rules, see this excellent guide on Grammarly.