Hyphens vs. Dashes

August 22, 2013

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

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