Hyphens vs. Dashes

I have a bad habit of using double hyphens as dashes. I am stopping that immediately.

Hyphens

Hyphens are for joining words together.

There were thirty-five of them out there.

Dashes

A dash is generally for a pause, and is often used as a replacement for parenthesis.

I doubt I’d be going–even with the extra incentive–because the pay wasn’t good enough.

Protip

Here’s how you make the dash in various ways:

• Ampersand – mdash – semicolon, in HTML

• Shift - Command - -, on a Mac