Hyphens are only used to combine certain words together. They are not strong enough to set off phrases or words from a sentence. Use hyphens in the following situations: Use in compound numbers and ...

Hyphenaters used to be fearless. Bad to the bone. Unflinching in the face of multi-word adjectives that required two or even three hyphens. An editor would see the terms “anti” and “social” and “media ...

There’s nothing wrong with hyphenating “multi-cultural.” There’s nothing wrong with not hyphenating “multicultural.” There’s nothing wrong with doing it both ways in a single document. But it’s very ...

Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes are frequently tested punctuation marks in government exam descriptive writing papers. Hyphens connect words, en dashes show ranges or relationships, and em dashes ...

Good questions have been piling up in my in-box lately. Ed in Albany had a question about a recent column in which I mentioned people "who just won't stop using the word 'over' wrong." Here's Ed: "Isn ...

Call me crazy. I'm dog-sitting this weekend, and we already have three dogs of our own. The visiting dog is a 1-year-old miniature beagle, and our beagle mix thinks he's a long-lost brother. They race ...

It seems we're always declaring our great fondness for this punctuation mark or that one. Oh, the whimsical nature of the semicolon and how smart she makes us feel. Oh, the gorgeous curves of the ...