Be Your Own Editor

I think I’m going to start a cult composed entirely of people who know what an en dash is. Average people, even average writer-type people, rarely know the term. And, frankly, they don’t need to. Almost all manuscripts use hyphens where en dashes should be, and a copyeditor will point those instances out. But familiarity with the en dash can, if you’re getting published, help you seem in-the-know when dealing with your copyeditor and proofreader. If you’re not yet published, you can toss it into a conversation at parties and sound like a nerdy-yet-cool punctuation freak (e.g., me).

Last night, at my writing workshop, the instructor was explaining the editing marks she uses to (politely) butcher our homework when suddenly I heard her floundering badly in an attempt to define the en dash. My writing teacher! Who is an experienced and highly respected editor, as well as a published author! She thought, maybe, that it was used in compound words, or something like that. And she had no idea how long it was in comparison to the hyphen (which you saw in “nerdy-yet-cool”) or the em dash (the longer, more common dash used for interrupted speech, etc., that looks like this: —).

My shyness at revealing my punctuation-geek status (okay, so maybe it’s not cool, just nerdy) almost kept me quiet, but I couldn’t restrain myself from raising my hand. I’m embarrassed to admit that I began by saying, “I’m embarrassed to admit that I know the proper usage of an en dash.” Shame on me! The en dash is an important and, dare I say, quietly beautiful form of punctuation that should be embraced and understood by all. (All writers, at least.)

Take note, writers who want to be in-the-know: An en dash is half the length of an em dash but longer than a hyphen. (The dashes take their names from the letters m and n, whose width they equal.) It has two common uses. The first is in a range of numbers or dates:

1941–1945
pages 236–39

The second is trickier: connecting a compound word/phrase in which one side of the compound is composed of two separate words. Since it’s really a visual thing, I’ll provide a couple of examples before you try to wrap your head around that:

a New York–bound train
post–World War II

The idea is that if a hyphen is used (”a New York-bound train”), the reader’s eye might be more inclined to read “York-bound” as a unit. As I said, it’s a visual thing, subtle but helpful. In those cases, proper nouns are involved, so a misread is unlikely, but at times an en dash can clarify meaning:

This en dash–heavy post could have been even more generally dash-heavy.

If you want to go goofy and actually include en dashes in your manuscript, I’ll even tell you the shortcut to create one in Microsoft Word: CTRL+hyphen. (The shortcut for an em dash is CTRL+ALT+hyphen.) It won’t get you published, but you may find yourself experiencing a tiny thrill each time you use one. I know I do. Seriously.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.