Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
IIAOPSW
krsdcbl
I strongly disagree.
By the same logic you might as well say: "why are we even kerning fonts, who cares if there's a few gaps when i write »irl«."
The fact that using different dashes does encode meaning in a subtle sense does have relevance for semantics -- but that's, imho, almost secondary to this argument, as it's not as grammatically relevant as commas and. periods, for example.
The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-typographic balance:
- A longer dash to link words that belong together is visually perceived as an interruption and doesn't feel like those two words are one
- In reverse, a shorter dash when switching context -- or interjecting another idea within a sentence -- doesn't slow the pace of the text flow enough, and your brain will read/intonate it the same way as when linking words.
- And at last, either of them won't preserve optical balance when displaying a numerical range, as numbers are wider than a hyphen, but narrower than an em space, which would result in either insufficient visual separation compared to spaces following said numbers, or too much of an optical gap within an entity that belongs together.
That's the barebones set of dashes that are relevant for a balanced typographical appearance, not made up pedantic complexity to annoy people. Otherwise we'd be taking about half and quarter em dashes and the likes.
tomxor
> you might as well say: why are we even kerning fonts [...] is paramount to micro-typographic balance [...] is visually perceived as an interruption [...] won't preserve optical balance
These are typesetters concerns, not writers concerns. They are all context sensitive tweaks to what amounts to the same glyph.
If the rules for each have as well defined contexts as the article suggests, then it sounds like something more suited to ligatures and kerning.
Full glyph replacement ligatures were not something initially supported by all font formats, so perhaps the fact that they continuing to exist as separate characters is more of a historical detail. It's something that could easily be added with new fonts though.
speleding
Ligatures typically change the appearance of a character, they do not change the meaning. Merging the hyphen en the n-dash into the same character and then derive the correct one from the context (spaces around it) would be a whole new use of "ligatures".
From a software "separating of concerns" viewpoint it feels wrong to me to have your font renderer infer meaning. A pre-processor that replaces hyphens with the correct dash – like Word does – feels more sane to me.
aikinai
Some fonts—like Inter—do this, but I see people complain that the font isn’t rendering exactly what they typed.
My favorite is that it will render 1920x1080, for example, as 1920×1080. I think the former looks terrible and unprofessional, especially when I see it in actual products rather than prose. So I really hope this catches on.
Aeolun
I’ve gone my entire life without knowing the difference and survived just fine.
It may not be entirely irrelevant, but it’s very close to it. A bit like saying your tie has to be knotted a specific way to look respectable. Very fun for the in-group, but completely incomprehensible to those outside.
Like, I’m not opposed to having a few silly things to learn just to separate those that can be bothered to pay attention from those that do not, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s actually relevant outside of that.
viraptor
> I’ve gone my entire life without knowing the difference and survived just fine.
That is an extremely low bar. People lived their entire lives without X for any X.
JohnFen
Text doesn't become unreadable when the dashes are used incorrectly, but (for me) when they're used correctly, they do make the text easier to read and digest.
MikeTheGreat
Thank you for the post. I still don't want to learn & spend mental energy on which of 3 different dashes to use, but now I do see why people would want to (and I think the reasoning is solid, even if I don't personally want to bother with it :) ).
You started by talking about kerning fonts, which is a great analogy.
Building on that - kerning is awesome because stuff looks better and I don't need to do anything for it to happen. Would it work to have my display system figure out which type of dash to use automatically?
Like, a dash inside a word should be short (under the assumption that you're linking the words together) and dashes with whitespace around it should be longer (under the assumption that you're switching context/injecting an idea into a sentence).
akho
Your message is somehow undermined by your use of “--” in place of “—”.
c22
No it isn't--double-hypens are a great alternative to an em dash and are interpreted as such by many people and some software. GP's argument is for the grammatical functionality of differentiating dashes, not the specific symbols used.
That said, I don't use en dashes, if I want my numbers to line up I use a fixed-width font.
mock-possum
Did you know double dash is treated as one single longer than normal dash by default in iOS?
This character ‘—‘ looks like one long dash to me, even though I typed the dash button twice. What’s even crazier is if I type four dashes ‘——‘ it still looks like one even longer dash; even six ‘———‘ is a solid line, and I can delete it by pressing the backspace button once
I have no idea how to get my phone to display two short dashes side by side: ‘--‘ maybe I can fake it by puttin an emoji in between, knowing that hackernews will filter it out. Let’s see what happens.
Edit - ooh that totally works. I’d never really paid attention to how this feature worked before.
sixtram
Why do we stop with hyphen, n and m dash? There are at least 30 different use cases, we should not reuse only 3 versions of some short line. Let's make 30 versions, one for each meaning. (cynicism)
ilyt
Never really cares about anything that you're saying about how the dashes should work to imaginary group of people way into typography
nirvdrum
Then don't use them? As a reader, I certainly appreciate when people do. When writing documents or HTML I use them because it adds clarity. When typing on a web form, I'll usually use "--" because it's visually similar and much easier to type on a US keyboard. No one, pedants included, have ever tried to correct me on it.
I also use capitalization and punctuation when I type while many people do not. It'd be great if they did, since it makes reading easier and takes almost no additional effort, but I'm not going to let it ruin my day. The parent comment is about why the distinction in dashes matters and has virtually nothing to do with typography enthusiasm, but rather reader comprehension. If you don't want to integrate that information into your life, great, but that's not really a refutation. For my part, I found it interesting. Even though I use em-dashes I learned more about how they're helpful. If you don't want to use them, I'm almost positive no one is ever going to correct you.
mock-possum
It also looks like you’re drawing attention to something — the use of the double dashes — in making a deliberate choice to break from the norm. Whereas if you just follow the way most people use dashes - single dashes, not double - then it doesn’t really stand out, it just looks ‘normal.’ You’re used to seeing it styled that way. It feels different.
frizlab
An example from the article:
Looks good: “Sometimes writing for money—rather than for art or pleasure—is really quite enjoyable.”
Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money-rather than for art or pleasure-is really quite enjoyable.”
Yes, punctation does matter. (In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.)
yardstick
Just add spaces. Sorted.
“Sometimes writing for money - rather than for art or pleasure - is really quite enjoyable.”
Findecanor
A common substitution for emdash is -- which are two hyphens with spaces around them.
Personally, I think two hyphens also looks better than just one, and it conveys that you really intended it to mean emdash rather than hyphen.
gnull
Em-dashes add a bit of a pause. And having them longer and taking a bit more of horizontal space makes it more intuitive. They also break a sentence into parts. Having them easily distinguishable helps navigate text and reduces overhead. Just like periods or paragraph breaks help you see parts of a text, or syntax highlighting helps you see lexemes in a program.
Using just one dash for everything will be readable in a text message or comment. But not in a (complicated) book, because there the benefit of these small things gets multiplied by the scale of the book.
IncRnd
Since I am now a hyper-hyphen-partisan-pundit after reading that blog post - I'd like to comment on your hyper-hyphenated comment.
> “Sometimes writing for money - rather than for art or pleasure - is really quite enjoyable.”
To me this looks like a cryptic-case of the corrective comma.
“Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable.”
kimburgess
En space, em space, three-per-em space, four-per-em space, six-per-em space, figure space, punctuation space, thin space, hair space, ideographic space, or Ogham space?
knert
This is what I do. I don’t see the problem here. I don’t see the need to adopt additional characters.
tines
Spaces can cause word wrap that can leave a dash at the end or beginning of a line, which is not beautiful. A spaceless em dash doesn't have the wrapping issues while retaining legibility. You could argue that that's a problem with word wrap algorithms, not punctuation, but that situation is not going to change any time soon.
greenicon
In German that’s the way it’s done: en-dash with spaces, em-dashes (basically) don’t exist.
jameshart
If you’re going to do that, en dashes look nicer (as explained in the article):
“Sometimes writing for money – rather than for art or pleasure – is really quite enjoyable.”
seszett
> In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.
The only French-speaking place I've seen em-dashes used in daily life was Québec. For some (good) reason, it seems administration took a lot of care in using correct typography. My voting district for example was Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (the first dash being an en-dash, and the second one a hyphen) and I was always amazed at how all communication actually used these two different dashes.
I can't imagine this level of care in French or Belgian official communication.
wlonkly
(By way of explanation, the parent commenter's voting district covered the Mercier and the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhoods.)
askvictor
I disagree that the first example looks good. Both cases would be better with spaces, which kind of renders the em dash unnecessary.
ghaff
Some places I write for use the em-dash with spaces and some without. I try to remember which is which but I often forget.
biztos
Looks better: “Sometimes writing for money — rather than for art or pleasure — is really quite enjoyable.”
Punctuation matters, but space -- the "zeroth punctuation mark" -- matters more!
The author does discuss spacing the dashes but is, given the overall point of the article, surprisingly noncommittal.
dmm10
Others have mentioned using spaces with an en-dash or hyphen instead of an em-dash. Having used a typewriter -back in the day- I learned to produce text like this.
How I learned the Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money -rather than for art or pleasure- is really quite enjoyable.”
To the teacher I learned from this was a standard way of punctuating on a typewriter.
IIAOPSW
The "unreadable" sample is very much readable. We can all read it. No one is tripping up trying to figure out what a "money-rather" is.
floodle
Not for me. It's readable, but my brain has to do more work. When I get to "money-rather" my brain trips up slightly, and then I'm confused until the next dash, then I go back and figure it out.
All possible and dealt with in under a second, but in the first example with the longer dash my brain recognises a parenthesis and I take a little "breath pause" before carrying on.
OGWhales
I can read it, but it definitely trips me up.
miramba
It‘s not unreadable, just a tad more difficult. And as others have pointed out, there are other ways of making it easier again than using a specific character. But the real point is: The information transported in both examples did not change its meaning and will be understood by the reader / receiver in both cases. If it‘s not, it matters. As long as it is, it‘s pedantic.
ehsankia
Wouldn't the alternative rather be to use commas there, not a hyphen?
"Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable."
In your head, do you read those differently?
jameshart
Personally, I think this sentence would benefit from a comma before the ‘or’. And in that case we could probably benefit from a clearer way of setting aside the parenthetical.
“Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art, or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable.”
– this seems awkward to me. This version, though:
“Sometimes writing for money—rather than for art, or pleasure—is really quite enjoyable.”
Isn’t that more fluid?
greggyb
Of course, we do use compound numbers in English.
A very common example is in threads for machined screw threads, e.g., 1/4-20. This is not a range of numbers spanning from 0.25 to 20.0, but rather a pair of numbers that define two metrics of a single thing, which combine to uniquely identify the thread.
Perhaps context is sufficient, but adding this to your examples gives us at least three scenarios where the single symbol would mean very different things with pairs of numbers: compounding, subtraction, and numerical ranges. If we add on the clause separation duties of the dashes mentioned in the article, we have four uses where a single symbol sits between two numbers and means entirely different things.
IIAOPSW
There's no shortage of mathematical notation and delimiting characters. Eg you could write your machine screws as .25+20i. Obviously you raise e to the power of your screw and you get a rotation rate in the complex plane, and a width of screw in the complex plane as well.
Compounding and numerical ops are basically never confused. Machine screw is the only one of these where its even plausible. Not that subtraction and range are ever ambiguous, but if they were just use "#1 - #n" to denote "the numbers 1/n being used as labels for some range of options, not as a numerical values".
All in all, we have plenty of characters. A minimal set of rules, minimal set of characters, rich in predictable patterns, is what makes for a good language. The existence of a whole slew of specialized characters, all basically indistinguishable and frankly unheard of to most, has to work hard to justify itself right to live on my keyboard. We have parenthesis, commas, colons both full and partial, brackets square and curvy, braces, slashes forward and back...More than enough permutations and code space for anyone's expressive needs. Why anyone would opt for more byzantine characters with more rules on top is beyond my imagination.
greggyb
Then certainly we should remove those superfluous brackets. Commas suffice for parenthetical asides. Sentences already imply grouping. I am a bit upset at your use of double quotes above. After all, we have the single quote, which consumes half as many valuable pixels and does just as good a job of indicating quotation. Colons of any level of completion merely separate clauses, a task more than thoroughly covered by commas and periods. Context is, of course, a great disambiguator, so I see no reason to use any statement terminator besides a period. What possible confusion could arise.
While we are at it, we have so many words. Perhaps we should simplify to one of the several published standards of simplified English. After all, the number of combinations of a thousand words in sentences of arbitrary length is enormous. Why anyone would opt for more byzantine words with more nuanced definitions and rich history of usage, tradition, and cultural value is beyond me.
We could go on with grammar (I mean really, what the hell is pluperfect), spelling ('c', for example is useless on its own, its uses being filled alternately by k or s), fonts (wtf is a serif), capital and lowercase letters, and I am sure many other topics.
Why do we keep more words, punctuation, and other linguistic and typographical devices around than we need? A mix of inertia and legitimate uses and perceived value. It seems to me that many people seem to draw a line between what is acceptable and what is not based on whatever they are comfortable and familiar with by the time they reach the end of their schooling.
thfuran
But apparently only insufferable pedants care about clarity. That's why we should stop using those pointless number glyphs too and just write them out in unary using hyphens. -/------------------------- is just fine.
IIAOPSW
.... -.-- .--. .... . -. ... .- -. -.. .--. . .-. .. --- -.. .. ... .- .-.. .-.. .. -. . . -..
gnull
Reminds me of this guy I met at a CTF. He decided that punctuation generally is unnecessary. What's the use of having so many different symbols if the only thing they denote is pauses between words.
so when he wrote something . he used only periods to denote pauses . no other punctuation symbols . no capital letters . some people were thinking that his periods stand for perl concatenation operators . i dont know if he is still doing this . i hope he stopped
dredmorbius
Writing is a recorded symbolic convention for the benefit of the sufficiently educated reader.
Eschewingallpunctuationforscriptocontinuaisofcourseppossiblethoughitishelltoread.Itisevendifficulttotypewithoutaddingthespacesreflexivelyifindasipostthis.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua>
There's a reason monks of old read aloud. It was about the only way to confirm the actual meaning of a text.
c22
Ucnevndrpsmevwlsandstllmkesmthgrdblbutbrly.
sundarurfriend
actually i kinda love that . punctuation is semi arbitrary anyway . and this is actually much easier to read than the usual literary english full of semicolons and dashes . mimics speech much better too .
jameshart
I think it mimics a certain kind of speech.
Some people do talk like that . All complete thoughts . Sequential.
Other people—and I very much count myself among them—have a less linear, more tree-like mode of expression; where the ideas, instead of building on what came before, are being laid out out of order – the ideas aren’t completed – and more complex punctuation is needed to establish the relationships between those thoughts.
It sounds like I’m saying the former is less sophisticated than the latter. I don’t think that’s true.
I think we should probably try to express our ideas in a way that doesn’t require out-of-sequence reasoning. Short, simple sentences. With clear meanings. Building on one another. Much easier to follow.
The tree-like mode of endless nested parentheticals and asides is just a rendering of an incomplete thought process.
Not better or more sophisticated. Just still in progress.
6th
Probably scored a. sweet gig. writing lines. for. Captain. Kirk.
mannykannot
The article is not actually very pedantic - at one point, the author encourages us to break the rules - and I feel it has been offered in the sense of "printers have developed these variations on the basic dash, and if you choose to use them, it is probably best to use them in the same sense as printers themselves do."
dredmorbius
In several significant computer typography systems, the notation for an en dash is a doubled hyphen (--), and for an em dash a tripled one (---). Notably LaTeX and Markdown (Pandoc flavoured: <https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html>).
bee_rider
In LaTeX I’ve been using \textemdash instead. I don’t actually know why, just, usually these sort of longer names tend to have some niche edge case they handle better.
em-dashes and parenthetical should be used sparingly so it isn’t too annoying to do all the extra typing.
dredmorbius
My preference is for spare markup where at all possible. Less typing, less mental overhead, clearer source text.
If it's necessary to be explicit for clarity and proper rendering, then sure. But otherwise, the less friction the better.
After years of procrastinating in learning LaTeX (the Lion Book turned out to be a clear, delightful, and highly useful reference), one of the pleasant surprises was that paragraphs are simply denoted by two carriage returns. After years of hand-coding HTML where matching <p> and </p> tags (among many others) was a constant occupational hazard, this was just ... pleasing.
Markdown has a similar philosophy, if a far more restricted set of capabilities. That set is however sufficient for a tremendous number documents, and if it's ultimately insufficient still remains a useful way to get started with writing.
paulcole
It reminds me of the strong feelings about Comic Sans.
The guy who created it said something like, “If you love Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby. And if you hate Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby.”
I feel the same about this. The average person has about a billion things to improve in their writing before the “correct” use of different dashes should become something they think about.
Helmut10001
Depending on the audience, I think the article is justified and gives a good overview. Just thinking of scientific papers, where sometimes you spend a full year carefully laying out the words. Being concise here helps improve legibility and is definitly worth the effort.
pas
... with all due respect to folks who choose the hard and extremely frustrating academic career path, the inefficiency is so absurd that it truly only can exist in these gigantic institution-sized machines. (And in similar sized corporate money-makers.)
Most papers are fundamentally flawed, unfortunately, due to lacking sufficient information and data for replication, being underpowered (and not controlling for many factors).
It took decades to get to some minimally sensible standards (preregistration, conflict of interest declarations, awareness of the most common stats issues, power analysis), but we're still far from doing effective science.
Money is still handed out based on feels, hypes, name recognition (when it's not blinded) for laughably small projects, instead of focusing on establishing longer term ones and/or improving the actual science output (ie. data and hypothesis generation) of existing ones.
(Yes, of course, academia approximates this. Yes, yes. Everything's fine. We'll have a usable model of Alzheimer's any second now! Aaany second. Just let this new totally effective model of depression/obesity/learning/ME-CFS out of the door first.)
chrismorgan
The article misses the rather important piece of trivia about technology compromises that what it has been calling “hyphen” is actually U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, rather than U+2010 HYPHEN. The situation there is a real mess: HYPHEN-MINUS is ugly in many fonts due to compromising between the ideal appearances of a hyphen and a minus sign, and HYPHEN is often missing from the font, leading to falling back to a hyphen from a different font rather than HYPHEN-MINUS from the same font (which is clearly more desirable, but technically unappealing).
A comment led to the follow-up https://www.punctuationmatters.com/the-difference-between-a-..., but it’s still very insufficient, only dealing with MINUS SIGN and assuming HYPHEN-MINUS was exclusively a hyphen. And appears to have suffered from the same replacement of lone HYPHEN-MINUS with EN DASH as this article.
cheschire
I get why you wrote those words in all caps but it still feels like you’re yelling emphatically about nothing, and that coincidentally sums up how I feel about the rest of this topic.
jurimasa
Thats so myopically HN... "I don't care about it, so it's probably not important and dumb anyway lol"
avgcorrection
It’s also very likely to be hypocritical: how many topics on HN are tuned towards a very specific kind of focus/nerdom? And what’s the point of commenting “aha, good for me that I don’t care aboutt this!…?
I guess the difference here is that someone’s boss might complain that they should follow this article, since we all write stuff from time to time.
klabb3
Agreed it’s very HN. But it’s not just bad. Hackers are usually hard-wired to reduce entropy—we’re quick to point out when something is redundant or unnecessarily ambiguous. Formalia is also used for gatekeeping, which the HN Zeitgeist doesn’t like.
That said, personally I need my different dashes, commas and parentheses for my excessive wavering.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
And to the one expressing that thought, you're right. To them, it's not important, and dumb.
You could argue, however, that they should refrain from posting, but they probably felt the need to share in case others felt the same way.
starkd
Made it 54 years without ever hearing about mdash/ndash/hyphen distinction. I've just been using the hyphen character for everything. Must have been absent that day in grade school.
undefined
ofalkaed
This guide and most guides like it tend to miss the most important and powerful use of the em-dash and make it out like you can use it for anything but really they are just missing the wonderful simplicity of the em-dash and how versatile that simplicity is. The em-dash raises and lowers the narrative voice. In fiction this provides a way to provide insight into the narrator; an em-dash tells us we are switching from the story the narrator is telling us to the thoughts of the narrator, a second em-dash or a period lowers the voice back down to the story the narrator is conveying. This is the sense of dialog being introduced with em-dashes instead of being quoted, a new line starting with an em-dash lowers the narrative voice, narrator hands story off to character.
The simplified rules for the em-dash are pretty much intuited and prescribed versions of this which gut the effectiveness of em-dash. In general use an em-dash should be used to denote thoughts without having too restructure/delete what you just wrote to accommodate that thought.
Edit: I oversimplified. Consistency is what is important, using an em-dash like a comma that isn't a comma leads to ambiguity when you also use commas. A writer who avoids semicolons and quotes all dialog can use an em-dash very differently than raising the voice, but they can also use a semi-colon very differently than its standard accepted role, that is what these simple guides miss, the consistency of usage, they just list all of the various ways you could use any given mark and people start using an em-dash to "fix" their long run-on sentence with all of its commas.
The closest thing we have to standard use allows for wonderfully complex sentences which can convey great meaning but consistent and well defined use is most important.
comma - connects independent and dependent clauses
em-dash - raises and lowers the voice
semicolon - connects independent clauses in a more direct way than the paragraph
colon - elaborates an idea
parenthesis - an aside, stated instead of thought
period - end of thought
Question mark and exclamation points do not need to be at the end of a sentence, they can double as comma, semicolon, or colon.
I seem to be missing a nuance of HN's line breaks and formatting.
jameshart
Reasonable choices. And a good description of a specific use for the em dash. But I think it’s a poor mind that can only conceive of a single use for a punctuation mark.
We could also use em dashes to signal excitedly running from one thought to the next—as if we’re just riffing on an idea—too fast to be interrupted—wouldn’t that be amazing?
Or we can use the em dash to slow us down—to pause and reflect on what we just said.
Or in dialog:
“Perhaps we can use it to signal an unexpected inter—“
“-rogation?”
“No, an interruption.”
“Yes, that would make more sense.”
“Oh! I just thought of something—we could also use it to indicate stunned silence.”
“—“
“Exactly.”
ofalkaed
It is easy to conceive of uses, having a consistent style which conveys what you want to most any reader is another thing. If you had wrote all those examples without using the text to explain them the reader would have to stop and think about what you are doing and that is not a good thing.
crooked-v
Sure, but any given work could introduce such a use within the first few pages and the reader would be accustomed to it pretty quickly.
crazygringo
I've never heard that perspective before about raising the voice, but I really like it.
What's even more interesting to me is that this contrasts with a parenthetical which I now realize lowers the voice when we read it aloud.
Did you discover that difference on your own or did you read it somewhere? Just curious.
ofalkaed
I realized it on my own in an intuitive sense, my writing before I properly learned it shows this use but eventually I read some things on punctuation and fixed my naive use of the em-dash and other punctuation marks. I think "raising the voice" might be the old fashioned term but I can not remember the more current term or even if there is one, put some time last night into trying to find it but search engines are nearly useless and return page after page of sites conflating voice and tone or prescription punctuation guides which just list uses with no care about consistency in style.
gverrilla
I realized it on my own in an intuitive sense - my writing before I properly learned it shows this use but eventually I read some things on punctuation and fixed my naive use of the em-dash and other punctuation marks. I think "raising the voice" might be the old fashioned term but I can not remember the more current term or even if there is one - put some time last night into trying to find it but search engines are nearly useless and return page after page of sites conflating voice and tone, or prescription punctuation guides which just list uses with no care about consistency in style.
bee_rider
This is how I read them.
My mental model is that an em-dash is a parentheses that author was too excited to slow down and make vertical.
arketyp
Do you have a reference for this? Never heard that particular framing about the narrative voice before. You call it a versatile simplicity, but to me it sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.
ofalkaed
Search engines seem to really fail here, they are just giving me more guides like the one here, I can not get them to give me anything about narrative voice beyond conflations of narrative voice and tone. You can see this use in a great deal of literature which uses the em-dash to introduce dialog in place of quotes, I believe Becket would apply but it has been years since I have read him so can not say for certain. Most of the authors known for their long complex sentences follow the conventions I outlined in my edit even if they do not use the em-dash for dialog.
>sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.
Write a single sentence which clearly and concisely includes exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question, self rebuttal and conclusion without following the "standard" I included in my edit. This is what allows writers like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences and by complex I am referring too meaning as much as structure, we can have great meaning with simple structures but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that. Sure that challenge can be executed as a paragraph but then it ceases being a single thought, it is a collection of thoughts and that is a very different thing.
jameshart
If you'll indulge me, I actually think your final paragraph could be copyedited to illustrate all of your suggested 'standard' rules — though in your own rendering you only used commas and periods.
> Write a single sentence, which clearly and concisely includes exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question, self rebuttal and conclusion, without following the "standard" I included in my edit: This is what allows writers (like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc) to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences (and by complex I am referring to meaning as much as structure); we can have great meaning with simple structures, but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that—sure, that challenge can be executed as a paragraph, but then it ceases being a single thought; it is a collection of thoughts, and that is a very different thing.
I tried to stick to your 'standard', though you might disagree on some of my choices. I would say I found it a little constraining. Here's an alternative edit that doesn't follow your rules but – I find – creates a more fluid reading of your original words:
> Write a single sentence, which clearly and concisely includes: exposition; thought; aside; rhetorical question; self rebuttal; and conclusion – without following the "standard" I included in my edit. This is what allows writers like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc, to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences—and by complex I am referring to meaning, as much as structure. We can have great meaning with simple structures – but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with that. Sure, that challenge can be executed as a paragraph; but then it ceases being a single thought—it is a collection of thoughts, and that is a very different thing.
All of which I hope goes to show that these choices are a matter of taste, not absolute rules
ofalkaed
I gave I look through my books and English is wonderfully ambivalent when it comes to punctuation outside of prescriptive grammars. The descriptive grammars largely (if not completely) ignore punctuation and focus on spoken language, even the Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language reduces punctuation "rules" to a single page and reduces hyphen/en/em-dash to a typographical convention and does not say much more than the dash is often used in informal writing to replace other punctuation marks. All we really have here is convention and consistency, can you meet the challenge I outlined without following the conventions I laid out? It can be done but it will be considerably more verbose than it would be following those conventions which is not a bad thing. Authors like McCarthy, Krasznahorkai, Ellman, Bernhard have all built their style around breaking those conventions (yes, two are translations when it comes to English but they break the conventions in their own languages as well.) Even Joyce breaks the convention and he does it within single works, switches between adherence and breaking, but not many have pulled that off in the way he did.
It is a really complex thing and part of what makes English literature what it is. We have conventions which have evolved over time when it comes to punctuation and we have prescription, but we don't really have rules unless you are writing tech documents or journal submissions. It comes down to having a clear and consistent use more than anything else and using every punctuation mark for any accepted use based on whim is not clear or consistent.
undefined
mrits
I think I'd like to fork the language and write one with sane guidelines.
atuladhar
The problem is that the real world, human thoughts and other things that language needs to try to express are not "sane." So if we are to have a common basis for communication, the guidelines will tend to get "insane."
IncRnd
This is way too much pedantry and hyper-hyphen-focus. Honestly, I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will. They add nothing to anyone's communications.
Perhaps, typesetting still uses these, but that's okay. They can keep doing so, since these probably add aesthetic appeal to how flyers are designed.
I also noticed a pundit-battle brewing in the depths of the hyphen-m&ndash-soup.
The article:
Let’s make that even more clear.
THE EN DASH IS ABOUT AS WIDE AS AN UPPERCASE N; THE EM DASH IS
AS WIDE AS AN M.
En and em dashes aren’t called that because they’re as wide as
a lowercase “n” and a lowercase “m.” They’re called that
because those are the specific typography jargon words that
refer to the height of a physical piece of type (the “em,”
also called the “mutton” to reduce confusion) and half that
height (the “en,” also called the “nut”). An em dash was
originally as wide as the font is tall.
quietbritishjim
> I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.
En dash is all over the place in personal/business writing, even just in email, thanks to Word and Outlook autocorrecting a hyphen to an en dash whenever it's between two spaces (rightfully in my opinion). If you've never seen it then that surely says more about what you notice than the content of what you've read.
That doesn't necessarily contradict your point – if you never notice the distinction then what's the point? But it's different from how I read the implication of your post.
(Funnily enough, without thinking, I put an en dash in the paragraph above by holding down on hyphen in the Android keyboard, and only caught myself after I did it.)
IncRnd
>If you've never seen it then that surely says more about what you notice than the content of what you've read.
I'll agree with this. It also brings up the point, if punctuation isn't seen - is it useful? Probably not to me - maybe yes to others.
chownie
You might not be able to pick out the bassline in many of your favorite songs but that doesn't mean you wouldn't miss it were it not there.
---
"Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are a kind of magic; their purpose is to be invisible. If the sleight of hands works, we will not notice a comma or a quotation mark but will translate each instantly into a pause or an awareness of voice [...] When the mechanics are incorrectly used, the trick is revealed and the magic fails; the reader's focus is shifted from the story to its surface."
- Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft
duopixel
Quoting Erik Spiekermann “Typography is like air. We only notice it when it's bad”
atuladhar
> if you never notice the distinction then what's the point?
Given there is usage of en dash in the wild as you mentioned, there's a possibility this may be a case of "you don't know what you got 'til it's gone."
ivanstegic
For someone who can quote Shakespeare [1] in a comment at the right time, you “…doth protest too much, methinks.”
IncRnd
Ah, I am cut to the quick. In truth, one must sometimes be cruel to be kind. To one such as I, neither the hyphen nor the dash are a dish fit for the gods. In tragic travesty, it's all Greek to me. All that glitters isn't gold! [1]
[1] a bunch of Shakespeare's sayings scraped together, after they were trampled in a mosh pit.
raldi
> I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.
There’s an en dash in the first line of text on apple.com right now. There are en dashes, em dashes, and hyphens in the most recent press release on that site, all used correctly.
avgcorrection
> This is way too much pedantry and hyper-hyphen-focus. Honestly, I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will. They add nothing to anyone's communications.
You have definitely seen them. All professional writing outlets, like e.g. the New York Times, use em-dashes, curly quotes, and other “typographic” characters that one is supposed to use in American English.
And newspapers in my own country follow the typographical rules. Even though no one uses it in informal communication on HN or FB. (Well, some on HN do.)
IncRnd
Except, I didn't write I hadn't seen them. "I've never seen them in business or personal writing".
We can discuss that I chose the word "seen", when I meant "noticed", but there is no doubt that I didn't write what you intimated. I have seen the dashes in formal writing and in newspapers.
A too-hurried reading is worse than not reading at all.
avgcorrection
Oh. So “business” does not encompass “professional writing”. Good to know.
And also not “formal writing”.
And presumably no copy-pasted message from Word or whatever other app inserts “smart”-whatever automatically.
And also not any regular old business website. (Did you think newspapers were the only ones? Just because those were the examples?)
Even for personal writing: some people even take the time to insert bullet points, so “proper” punctuation is easy for them.
You’re a fine one to complain about pedantry. (I guess yours is a just-right level of (cover your ass) pedantry.)
Sprocklem
IIRC, both of these are more or less true:
> THE EN DASH IS ABOUT AS WIDE AS AN UPPERCASE N; THE EM DASH IS AS WIDE AS AN M.
> They’re called that because those are the specific typography jargon words that refer to the height of a physical piece of type (the “em,” also called the “mutton” to reduce confusion) and half that height (the “en,” also called the “nut”).
An em was traditionally the width of an uppercase M and an en half that (around the width of an uppercase N). Nowadays, this relationship doesn't necessarily hold: one em is equal to the font size (e.g., a 12 pt font has one em = 12 pt).
2-718-281-828
obsessing about mundane details like that provides certain kinds of people with a mild feeling of control over their lives.
avgcorrection
With what kind of telepathy did you uncover this fact?
2-718-281-828
introspection and observation.
throwingrocks
[flagged]
IncRnd
I'm against ped:antic-pun-ctu,ation)) not against pretty, practical and productive punctuation.
larrymcp
Ironically on a punctuation blog, it looks like he has a punctuation typo in his title. In the headline, the semi-colon after "hyphen" should actually be a colon. So the corrected headline is "En dash, em dash and hyphen: what’s the difference?"
A colon is used in this context, when you're introducing the question that follows.
gverrilla
This article is wrong all over, from where I stand. Who uses semi-colon in titles???
jotaen
> Some people prefer the way a “space-en-dash-space” looks.
I think this isn’t just a matter of personal preference, but it’s also largely a cultural thing – in German, for example, the “space-en-dash-space” form is common.
This is true for a lot of other punctuation as well. For instance, in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”. Whereas in Switzerland or France, it’s common to quote using Guillemets, as in «Hello there!». This style can also be found in German texts, though it’s less common than quotation marks, and it would typically be used »inversely«.
arp242
> in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”
This is also the traditional style in Dutch; it's what I was taught at school. These days many just use "upper quotes". You can still find the traditional style in books and some newspapers, but others have switched over the years.
In traditional Ethiopian you would use ፡ as a word separator, and ። as a full stop. Over time, people have started to "just" use the space as a word separator. There's some Wikipedia pages that mix both styles; for example on [1] you can see ፡ being used for the first three paragraphs and then it switches to a space. I rather like being able to see the evolution of language/typography on a single page.
[1]: https://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%8A%A0%E1%88%9B%E1%88%AD%E1...
mtlmtlmtlmtl
Interesting. I also see a few periods and a lot of colons with a line over them.
What do they mean? Just curious.
arp242
Comma, question mark, stuff like that. There's an overview at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic#Punctuation
glandium
Since you're quoting France, it's worth noting that there, double punctuations (?:!;) are preceded by a half-space (although in practice it's always a full space). Likewise, guillemets are surrounded by spaces (the space inside the guillemets might be a half-space, I'm not entirely sure). So it would be « Hello there ! »
FabHK
Easy way to identify francophone writers. They always have a space in front of their colons, exclamation marks, etc.
groestl
Ahhhhh, thanks for that! I'm German speaking, and I must admit I questioned the intellectual capacity of some people I conversed with, due to that. In German there is even a slur for it: "Deppenleerzeichen" (fool's whitespace). Now that clears things up.
nephanth
An unbreakable half-space, to be pedantic (though in this case the pedantry makes sense: you don't want your punctuation mark to end up on the next line)
glandium
And for extra fun, while the French word for space (espace) is masculine gender (un espace) for most its meanings, in typography, it's feminine (une espace).
Symbiote
Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style.
The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
laserlight
I consider a crime not to have any spaces between em-dashes and adjacent words. Traditionally, I guess, there were spaces of different sizes. Hair-thin spaces were typeset before and after em-dashes --- that's what I do in LaTeX using (\,). But, because different sized spaces have never been a thing on the Web, let alone plain text, people have preferred to not use any spaces, for some reason.
Symbiote
HN normalizes thin and hair spaces to normal spaces, so they can't be demonstrated here, but there is an example on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
FabHK
I wouldn't call it a crime, but a convention. In Europe it's an n-dash with surrounding spaces, in the US is an m-dash without spaces. For me, the former is nicer, but crimes are maybe a tad more serious.
avgcorrection
I think Medium uses hairspaces. And of course there’s some automation since all writers seem to get that thing.
There ends my trivia about that unusable site.
SeanLuke
This is precisely what I do religiously in my latex: M-dashes are always {\,---\,}
euroderf
Unspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us - software types.
Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not strictly kosher.
BlueTemplar
And BTW, all of these can be found on the new AZERTY keyboard :
(BÉPO version also exists)
kps
That looks well thought out. I use a QWERTY layout with similar reasoning applied to the Option/AltGr levels (but entirely different in specific placements) and I routinely type various dashes and quotes without conscious thought, any more than I consciously think about Shift-level punctuation.
otherme123
In Spain the RAE (equivalent to the Oxford Dictionary) recomends «this», but you will almost never find it except in professional printing. They are not in the keyboard, so everybody uses "this".
kzrdude
It's a shame when technology fails us in this way - I just mean that computers are created to be our tools, and if we want to easily write «this», we can make that happen. If we only have people with this mindset (computers are our tools) in the right places.
IIAOPSW
I'm sure that's a ton of fun for anyone trying to write a natural language parser. LMAO using the end brackets as start brackets and vice versa.
groestl
> trying to write a natural language parser.
I assume we're done doing that, that task is finished ;)
IIAOPSW
I get you mean chatGPT has solved the problem, but it feels as if its solved the problem without answering the deep questions. We still don't really get how the brain does it or the answer to any of the deep linguistic questions, instead we get two systems capable of language which no one understands. But at least its useful! So maybe there are natural language parsers yet to be written, for nothing else than to finally test our understanding of natural language parsing.
nor-and-or-not
Actually we quote „like this“.
tsimionescu
There are many other quote styles - my language uses „these signs” (which we call "ghilimele", similarly to French "guillaumets").
EDIT: Seems HN is eating up the right signs... You can see them on Wikipedia here, they essentially look like two small commas: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghilimele
nor-and-or-not
Oh, you quoted correctly, but the display of the right quotes is messed up. They should go from upper left bottom to upper right top, but instead show as upper left top to upper right bottom.
jotaen
Yeah, so we could conclude that punctuation is not just a cultural thing, but – to make matters worse – depend on the whims of the font maker as well.
Voklen
I do often wonder whether we should maintain traditional typography when moving to a digital age because punctuation evolves as language does. If we’ve deemed it unnecessary to have seperate symbols for each of the dashes and everyone uses language that way then that’s fine. We can also ask this question about smart quotes, you’ll notice I’ve been using the U+2019 as the apostrophe here and I could “quote” like this. It's a question of how much ambiguity it causes, how easy it is to input, and how subjectively aesthetically pleasing it is.
My personal opinion for hyphens is:
- Ambiguity: most can be cleared up with spaces, and for examples like 3-8 if it’s numbers we can tell it’s a range from context
- Ease of input: one character is a lot easier to decide between than 3 (or 4 if you include minus), and if there are rules for software to be able to input the correct character every time then the differences in characters become redundant
- Subjective aesthetics: I quite like the consistent compactness of the single hyphen
And for quotes:
- Ambiguity: They show when quotes start and end which is quite nice and we can have nested quotes. But these are things that are not critical to meaning and simply make it easier
- Ease of input: Usually automated but can absolutely tear through code if pasted in the wrong place. If we deem these smart quotes useful enough then they can coexist with typewriter quotes peacefully if we do not run the quote formatting on code blocks (which is where code should be anyway)
- Subjective aesthetics: I do like the look of smart quotes but would be willing to use straight quotes
avgcorrection
The pragmatic thing is to stay glued to the typewriter and then escape our nested strings with Unix toothpicks everywhere.
> Ambiguity: They show when quotes start and end which is quite nice and we can have nested quotes. But these are things that are not critical to meaning and simply make it easier
Typographic conventions go further than that.
In Norwegian it’s `«»` for one level of nesting. For nested quotes you are supposed to use something else. Maybe `‘’` (single quotes) for the second level and then `“”` (American English double quotes).
Maybe American English uses `“”` and then `‘’`.
In my opinion that’s not necessary. At least for text storage.
derbOac
Part of my complaint about that is that although I think the different punctuation marks are great, using them is a pain because of keyboard layouts.
It's easy to find a hyphen (or something close enough) on your physical keyboard, but there's no em dash. OSes also make it a pain to automate even when they claim otherwise.
I go out of my way to use em dashes but do I think others would? No way. So is lack of use because of lack of utility or because of idiosyncrasies in keyboards?
Hyphens are great for some things but are too short to visually offset text.
kps
The Mac layouts handle the dashes well in my opinion (quotes not so much). Option+‘-’ is ‘–’ (en dash), Option+Shift+‘-’ is ‘—’ (em dash). Option is equivalent to AltGr in the Windows PC world.
xeonmc
What about using tilde for numeric ranges?
"The global conflict spanning the years 1939~1945 is known as World War 2..."
scbrg
Tilde is already used for approximation though.
The sentence as you wrote it could be misinterpreted as "the conflict spanning the years 1939 to ca. 1945...".
Had you used a dash/hyphen/minus/whatever nobody would be likely to misinterpret that as "the conflict spanning the years minus six..."
teddyh
No, ≈ is used for approximation, ~ is just the most similar ASCII character, and it became ingrained by people used to using old computers. Just like * is not a multiplication sign, but × is.
mrspuratic
¿But which tilde? I'm a fan of typographical abuse of the ⁓ swung dash myself.
Voklen
Ohh yes, reducing the amount of tasks the hyphen is used for helps as well
BrandonS113
It is easy to say this doesn’t matter, and personally, I couldn’t care less which is used. However, professionally, I have twice in the past two months had a deal with text that was edited by line editor for my organisation, where they strongly criticised our use of these punctuation markers.
And, after much cursing, and my team spending time changing the text, I reflected, and came to like those punctuation markers. Took me a long time, but I have been converted.
swyx
in 180 characters: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1344127570753646593
A guide to the 3 dashes in English:
Hyphens (-) are compound-words.
En dashes (⌥ -) connect beginning–ending.
Em dashes (⌥⇧-) can replace parentheses and colons — use them more!
perihelions
Or in Linux,
En dash (–): Compose - - .
Em dash (—): Compose - - -
https://tstarling.com/stuff/ComposeKeys.html
https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e...
teddyh
Also on Windows: http://wincompose.info/
politelemon
Of the three major OSes, Linux has the most intuitive way of producing special characters with its compose keys
otherme123
To my surprise, no spaces around mdash is the general recommendation.
gk1
Moving through text using Cmd + Left/Right arrow will jump over two words if there’s an em dash between them with no spaces. As a frequent em dash user that was very annoying, so I switched to adding spaces — to hell with the APA.
brycewray
True; depends on the style guide, but most opt in that direction. The Chicago Manual of Style is very firmly in favor of it.
FabHK
It's more a matter of continent than style (ie, the former can explain most of the variance).
greenicon
The alternative is usually en-dash with spaces.
yakubin
In Polish em dash is supposed to be surrounded with spaces. I got that rule ingrained in my subconscious so heavily that I feel very uneasy looking at em dashes without spaces even in English. Same way if someone didn’t put a space after a full stop. So I’ve decided to go the British way and use en dash surrounded with spaces. And, after doing that, em dash really feels way too long. :)
Ennea
"Do the first two look the same to you? It’s because some devices display them inconsistently, when the characters sit all by themselves."
And also because this article uses an en dash in the table in place of a hyphen.
starkparker
Interestingly, if I copy that first character in the table early enough in the page load, it's a hyphen. If I copy it later, it's an en dash. Considering that this article is from 2010, I assume there's some JS added in the last 12 or so years that's autoconverting it.
EDIT: Wayback confirms it's supposed to be a hyphen: https://web.archive.org/web/20120120121527/http://www.punctu...
anderskaseorg
It’s the server (probably WordPress’s fault), not JS. – is an en dash:
$ curl -s https://www.punctuationmatters.com/en-dash-em-dash-hyphen/ | grep -A6 '<h3>What'
<h3>What do they look like?</h3>
<table style="height: 139px;" width="289">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><strong> –</strong></td>
<td><strong> hyphen </strong></td>
</tr>tsimionescu
I guess they respected their own recommendations: "when you're trying to illustrate what a hyphen looks like" was not one of the recommended uses of a hyphen!
I should also note that this whole point seems at best a point for typography geeks. These are three almost identical marks that have very similar uses. I am completely convinced that no one has ever disambiguated a phrase by noticing that something is a hyphen and not an en-dash or vice-versa.
strogonoff
For a somewhat more advanced (and IMHO much more beautifully typeset) but still succinct overview of em dash (and some other dashes) in practical use, see https://twos.dev/dashes.html.
Suitable for those who are familiar with punctuation basics but may want a refresher, and AFAICT gets some things more correctly (e.g., the numbers in a range are generally separated by a figure dash, not en dash).
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
Oh this is easy.
m dash: --
n dash: -.
.. I take it few people find morse code puns funny anymore.
Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry. What does having 3 basically identical characters add to the language other than a pointless rules for insufferable pedants to power trip over. We've all been using - just fine. On what basis does the person writing this article believe these rules matter, are important, disambiguate language?
Call me a hopeless philistine, but I say down with the dash. One symbol is fine for word-compounding, numerical ranges, subtraction, mid word line breaks. No one needs an em dash to tell them pages 3-8 is not a compound word.