English Grammar For Dummies by Geraldine Woods

Author:Geraldine Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Useful Little Marks: Dashes, Hyphens, and Colons

In This Chapter

Inserting dashes for maximum effect

Using long and short dashes correctly

Placing hyphens in compounds and interrupted words

Knowing where to place a colon in a business letter, list, and quotation

In a classic episode of an old detective show, the hero’s sidekick writes a book. The entire thing has no punctuation whatsoever. The author explains that he’s going to put in “all that stuff” later. Many writers sympathize with the sidekick. Who has time to worry about punctuation when the fire of creativity burns? But the truth is that the three little marks I explain in this chapter — dashes, hyphens, and colons — go a long way toward getting your point across.

Inserting Information with Dashes

Long dashes — what grammarians call “em dashes” — are dramatic. Those long straight lines draw your eye and hold your attention. But long dashes aren’t just show-offs. They insert information into a sentence and introduce lists. Short dashes — technically, “en dashes” — aren’t as showy as their wider cousins, but they’re still useful. Short dashes show a range or connect words when the word to or and is implied.

Long dashes

A long dash’s primary job is to tell the reader that you’ve jumped tracks onto a new (though related) subject, just for a moment. Here are some examples:

After we buy toenail clippers — the dinosaur in that exhibit could use a trim, you know — we’ll stop at the doughnut shop.

Standing on one manicured claw, the dinosaur — delivered to the museum only an hour before the grand opening — is the star of the exhibit.

The information inside the dashes is off-topic. Take it out, and the sentence makes sense. The material inside the dashes relates to the information in the rest of the sentence, but it acts as an interruption to the main point that you’re making.

The words between a pair of dashes may or may not form a complete sentence. Fine. However, some people use only one dash to tack a complete sentence onto another complete sentence. Not fine! (Also, an issue you may encounter on standardized tests.) Here’s what I mean:

WRONG: The curator painted the dinosaur orange — everyone hates the color.

RIGHT: The curator painted the dinosaur orange — everyone hates the color — because she wanted to “liven the place up.”

ALSO RIGHT: The curator painted the dinosaur orange; everyone hates the color.

ALSO RIGHT: The curator painted the dinosaur orange — a color hated by everyone.

The first example sentence is wrong because a dash can’t link two complete sentences. The second example is okay because a pair of dashes can surround a complete sentence embedded inside another complete sentence. The third example avoids the problem by linking the two sentences with a semicolon. The fourth example is correct because a dash may add extra information at the end of a sentence, as long as the extra information isn’t a complete sentence. (A color hated by everyone isn’t a complete sentence.)

Is the

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