How to use a hyphen

Dear editors,

Next week, starting Monday at 4 p.m. EST, we’ll tackle hyphenation in our second Copy-Editing Theme Week. Meet me in the #curbed-copy-edit and #eater-copy-edit Slack rooms on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for challenges and conversations. More info here!

There are some hard-and-fast rules in AP Style: Never use two spaces after a sentence. Capitalize the first word after a colon if it begins a complete sentence. Put periods inside of end quotation marks.

But some matters are a little more ambiguous. Maybe that’s why hyphenation comes up a lot in our grammar Slack rooms: because, as the AP Stylebook puts it, “Use of the hyphen is far from standardized. It is optional in most cases, a matter of taste, judgment and style sense.”

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t guidelines. Are you using a multiple-word adjective before a word it’s modifying? Generally, you’d hyphenate it. (Single-family home, brand-new restaurant, 4,000-square-foot space.)

Is the first word in the compound an adverb ending in “ly”? Skip the hyphen. (Brightly lit room, lightly salted potage, newly famous YouTube star.)

In general, the hyphen is a look-it-up punctuation mark. Some nouns and verbs just have hyphens in them, like alt-weekly and gado-gado and lip-sync. Others never have hyphens, even as adjectives, like health care and soft serve.

We’ll take on all this and more with challenges and discussions next week, each slated to take place for about 30 minutes. Drop by our Slack rooms to join in!

Other News

How people laugh online. A piece on using transitions in your writing (H/T Sara Polsky). And Mike Pompeo stresses out about the improper use of commas.

Have a great weekend!

Emma