Don Bates

Perhaps it’s part of the general lack of attention to detail these days. Or maybe it’s the internet with its highly creative and sometimes confusing design of punctuation marks. Or millennial insouciance. Whatever the reason, most PR and marketing communication writers confuse the dash and hyphen. They mostly use hyphens where dashes should go. Not good!Why? Because the misuse lowers the readability of the documents in which they occur. And that goes triple these days because parenthetical pauses (i.e., ellipses, dashes, parentheses, brackets) are used so cavalierly. 

Why hyphens?

Hyphens are used to join words. They’re always shorter than dashes. They indicate:

• Words with a combined meaning (heart-warming spectacle, five-year-old).
• Words linked in the sentence’s grammar (pick-me-up drink, erosion-carved cliffs).
• Words continued from one line to the next on a page or in a column:

• Words missing an implied element (The changes are both short- and long-term).
• I used bullets in this list because it’s easy to do from my computer’s style bar, but for technical and aesthetic reasons, the Associated Press Stylebook and therefore most newspapers and magazines require dashes in place of bullets. For example:

-- Abbreviate the month in complete dates, e.g. Aug. 16, 2018, and write out the month when there is no day, e.g., August 2018.-- Headline style is initial cap letter, everything else lower case except proper nouns and the first word after a colon, e.g., “Writing is easy says Prof. Bates: But only if you practice.”

Improper use of hyphens

• “I said I was leaving-despite his insistence I stay-and I left.”  The correct mark should be dashes, which would separate the words so they’re easier to read and understand. And with the added space on either side per AP style.

“I said I was leaving – despite his insistence I stay – and I left.” 

Why dashes?

Dashes are used to:

• Indicate an abrupt break or pause in a sentence:
  • “He crushed the ball – the crowd’s roar was deafening – and watched it sail out of the park as he casually ran the bases.”
  • “She paused and added – her lips trembling – I don’t know what to say.”
  • “I want to make this clear as crystal – I quit!”

Proper use of dashes

The dash comes in two forms: the En dash ( – ) and Em dash (—), named for the length of a typeface's lower-case “n” and upper-case “M” respectively. En dashes typically have spaces around them (if they didn’t, they would look like hyphens) and Em dashes usually don’t. They “run in.”The AP Stylebook requires spaces around either dash if used parenthetically. So does The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage.  The Canadian Elements of Typographic Style recommends the spaced En dash, arguing that the length and visual magnitude of the Em dash “belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.”Academically focused American sources such as The Chicago Manual of Style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) say the Em dash shouldn’t be surrounded by spaces, but PR and marketing communication writing is not academic writing.  (I didn’t hyphenate “Academically focused” because it’s not AP or NYTimes style; the “ly” acts as the hyphen. 

What to do from now on?

Most important, know the difference between a dash and a hyphen, and use them correctly to make what you write more readable and emphatic.As PR/Marcomm writers, we should follow the AP Stylebook. It’s our industry’s standard because so much of what we write is media-oriented and based on fundamental journalistic principles and practices since PR became a management function over 100 years ago.For me, spaces on either side of dashes – like so – make the intended emphasis easier to identify, therefore easier for our readers to comprehend. What better reason to get “spacey” from now on when we write?

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About the Author: Don Bates, APR, Fellow PRSA, executive writing consultant and trainer, is an adjunct instructor in New York University’s MS-degree public relations and corporate communication program, and PR agency M&A consultant with Gould Partners.  His email is db155@nyu.edu. His blog is www.writingRX.tumblr.com