Craptacular Grammar Tip: Quotation Marks Gone Wrong

NOTE: In case you thought I might be unaware, I know that “craptacular” isn’t a word. It seemed to fit the quality of the examples, however. Check back for more posts in this new series!

Out of curiosity, I clicked a reputable organization’s free “Grammar Tip of the Day” link, to see whether I’d like to subscribe. I found this example and immediately thought that the only reason I’d ask for such a tip each day would be to provide fodder for One Step Forward. Why? At best the tip oversimplifies punctuating with quotation marks. At worst it gets the rule wrong.

I would perhaps not have reacted so strongly had the first example not been incorrect. If you use quotation marks you should only include the punctuation if what is inside them would stand alone. You do put commas and question marks inside quotation marks for dialogue but not song, movie, and book titles unless the punctuation is part of that title.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the tip should be rewritten entirely. Were I to be so foolish as to reduce the proper use of quotation marks to a single sentence it would read thus: “Punctuation only belongs inside the closing quotation mark when it is part of the quotation itself.” Don’t bow to “popular opinion”; learn how to use quotation marks correctly!

Remember that this does not apply to dialogue. In writing the spoken word the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks, though the period does not. Well, it does if it’s followed by another sentence in the same…I should write a post about this. Oh, wait, I did.

It offends me to see such sloppy advice sent out as “help”. If people unfamiliar with the grammar rules take this and its ilk as gospel it will further erode my ability to teach my children how to speak and write like educated persons. Oh, and you all, my dears.

Cute Overload Hurts Everyone

Thanks to my unseemly interest in the residential sprinkler debate, I find myself with yet another example of bad grammar in journalism. The Greenville, South Carolina Examiner published an article recently that contained the following:

After an emblazoned battle between industry professionals and 100's of firefighters that were in support of fire sprinklers and the Home Builders Association and numerous builders who were against, the SC House and Senate sided with the latter.

I can find at least three problems with this sentence, and I don't mean the implication that the HBA and builders are not industry professionals. I started looking at the grammar because of the use of the word "emblazoned", which was too cute by half. While you could, indeed, make a case for interpreting the word to mean "having been made famous" no reader should have to work that hard to interpret a newspaper article.    

The battle may have been bitter, contentious, well-publicized, or otherwise notorious. To emblazon something is to make it more noticeable, certainly, but the usual use involves adding decoration to the thing rather than arguing about it in public fora. Do we suspect the author used the word solely because of the "blaz" in the middle? I don't know about you but I certainly do.

Once I got past that, the "100's" pulled me up short yet again. First, why the heck wouldn't you just use the word hundreds in this context? Second, that apostrophe made me post this. I was willing to let emblazoned pass but this? No. The little jot of punctuation seems to have strayed from the word Builders, where it by rights ought to be at the end. To be fair very, very few associations make use of the plural possessive correctly but the writer should have known better. As the longest sentence of nine in the article, one would have thought the editor would have made him.

The Difference between Parentheses and Brackets

As far as specialized punctuation goes, brackets rank as one of the most useful types, if only under their very specific uses. Parentheses mark off material that supplements a sentence, explanations and asides that add information or feeling but are not grammatically necessary. You can use them either within a sentence or to set off additional exposition within a paragraph.

Parenthetical additions, however, should be carefully monitored. They tend to distract your readers from the content of your text, as writers often add their own running commentary to the flow of the story. Adding things like a location, a telephone number, or an explanation of a detail that clarifies a connection helps your readers to make sense of a piece. Placing your opinion, however, within parentheses (such as noting that the actress who won an award was wearing a particularly unattractive dress), simply provides a side track for their thoughts that takes them away from the point of your writing.

In part, brackets perform a similar function but only within direct quotes. You use brackets for such clarifications as naming the person or thing to which a pronoun refers, changing a capital letter to a lower-case one or vice versa (to preserve correct punctuation and sentence structure), or to note an error in the original language with the “sic” notation. Brackets have only one other generally-accepted use: they prevent you from having to use parentheses within a set of parentheses. As you may imagine, you should reserve that use for the most pressing of matters, such as adding a citation to an explanation.

Back to Basics: Apostrophes

In response to a recent comment from Linda on an earlier post, I have gathered here my previous apostrophe posts and will attempt to cover any ground I've missed among them. I had intended this post to rely heavily on these earlier examples, but I discovered, to my chagrin, that I hadn't ever written a really basic piece about apostrophes. I intend to correct that oversight here.

• Apostrophe Abuse
• Working around the Apostrophe
• Apostrophes after an S

And now for the basic definitions. You use apostrophes to indicate either possession, by a noun, or at least one letter having been left out of a word. The latter occurs most often in contractions such as “don't”, “can't”, and you've” but also shows up when parts of words or numbers have been left off of the start or end, especially in dates. You can write, “During the '80s,” to indicate that you have left off the 19 in the year. Note that the expression requires only one apostrophe, as the ending s indicates a plural number of years and not the decade's possession of something.

If you are anything like me, you'll find one use of the apostrophe confusing. Sources consider it appropriate to use the apostrophe when indicating more than one lower case letter, as in “mind your p's and q's”. You need not include the punctuation when talking about more than one capital letter (Ls), number (7s), or symbol (?s). I don't understand that rule, but I include it here for completeness.

I hope that answers your questions, Linda, and gives you an idea of what you can and should not do with apostrophes. If anyone needs more clarification, please drop me a note below and I'll answer them in the near future.

Quickie Post: Apostrophe Abuse Alert

I grant my “Misused Apostrophe of the Day” award to the question I found this morning that began thus: “In Tom Jone's 2002 remix”. Perhaps a brief apostrophe review would help the asker more than the answer to the question posed.

Follow this simple rule for indicating possession: add an apostrophe and an s if using a singular noun. Poor Tom Jones has been stripped of his own s and reduced to Mr. Jone. That's no way to treat a musical legend.

The question should have begun, “In Tom Jones's 2002 remix...” At this point, I've forgotten the name of the song in question. There's nothing like a completely misplaced apostrophe to distract you from a writer's point.

For those of you who are thinking, "I though you only needed an apostrophe after a final s," please see my post on apostrophe placement after an s. Thanks for asking!

A Comma Review

Due to time constraints, I won't do much more today than posts the list of my comma-related posts. I would love, however, to receive questions from you folks. If you can't understand or disagree with a rule, please let me know so that I can explore and explain.

Since I have a three-day weekend going, I'll have a more interesting—and useful—post tomorrow. I may even be moved to rework this one, should good questions arise between now and then either in my own mind or here in the comments. Here's the list of posts specific to commas:

a general comma overview,
using commas in dates,
commas versus semicolons, and
commas in lists.

Regarding Punctuation and Some Latin

You may be interested in an on-going discussion in the Helium Writer's Workshop about the overuse of commas. It has expanded into a conversation about how and why to punctuate in general. Rather than rehash my feelings on the matter, I'll just leave you the link.

I have a fresh example of the horrors that public forum posting can wreak on weak writers. A woman another writers' board began a paragraph with this:

“ie; articles that do not make sense”.

After I finished reconstructing my skull, its having exploded, I considered what i.e. meant, here. For those of you who are unaware, the abbreviation stands for the the Latin words “id est” and are translated as “that is”. “The bottom line, i.e. our profit margin, has been rising steadily.”

The abbreviation that this poster intended to use was RE: instead. Note the capitalization and the colon. Had she thought about it, she would (perhaps) have seen that writing out “regarding” (and starting her sentence with a capital letter) would have made her rant easier to read and more convincing.

We won't even address the insidious, apparently contagious, proliferation of the ellipsis. I see it taking over normal paragraphs, turning several sentences into loosely-connected garbage. I've been forced to institute a policy of ignoring all posts in which this problem appears. Not only am I unable to trust the opinions of someone who cannot grasp the most basic piece of punctuation, but my newly-reassembled skull needs to set for a few more weeks before I can expose it to that much stress.

Using Commas in Your Dates

How you write a date depends largely on where you learned to do so. How to punctuate that date, however, does not.

Americans tend to write dates listing the month before the day. Most of the rest of the world inverts those elements. Which way you choose to write a date affects how many commas, if any, are required. Adding the day of the week requires a comma, in any case. “We delivered the package on Friday, April 3rd, 2008.” “They took delivery Friday, 3 April 2008.”

When you write a date out, like the first of March, you need a comma only if you include the year. If you specify the first of March, 2012, you must insert a comma on either side of the year. If you want to indicate the first of March every year, you don't need a comma around the date at all unless the structure of the sentence demands one (as when it is part of or followed by a dependent clause like this sentence).

Should you prefer to start your dates with the month, you will need a comma between the day of that month and the year. As in the previous example, you don't need any commas if you don't name a year. “I will call my parents on April 5th.” “I will call my parents April 5th, 2008.” Both versions are written correctly. The former example simply implies that I will make a phone call every year on that date.

For some reason that I could not discover, when you write the date before the month you don't need any commas at all (again, unless the structure of the sentence demands one). Thus I could write that 5 April 2008 lives on in my memory. You can also skip commas if you list a month or season and the year. “Spring 2008 will prove a strong quarter for research and development.” “By July 2008 we intend to have proven our commitment to research.”

I have trouble remembering that last rule, as reading the sentence aloud seems to require a pause between the month and the year. Does anyone else have a date-writing or comma rule that poses a constant challenge?

Apostrophes and the S

A question was recently raised on a forum that I frequent about apostrophe use. One poster contended that you use 's at the end of singular nouns except for characters in mythology. Thus Achilles' heel is correct but James' book is not.

I'd never heard such a thing before, and went to take a look. I found Herff Jones and his contention that proper nouns ending in “s” need only the apostrophe. Then I found the Page of Achilles, which offers a more thorough consideration of the matter.

As in most rules, I cannot understand why you have to consider the special cases to decide whether a rule applies (hence my support of the Oxford comma). If single nouns require an 's to indicate possession, them that's what they should get.

How people subsequently pronounce the word does not fall under my consideration when writing. Regardless of their oral stumbling, at least they can clearly understand what I mean. Apparently, I'm half right.

Ped almost agreed with me on his Telegraph blog post on apostrophes. There was interesting discussion on that post, as well. I get to trump that with the agreement of William Safire and The New York Times.

Out of gratitude, I'm skipping the quibble with Mr. Safire adding a possessive to the end of the Court of Saint James. Well, I'm not including it here. It does raise the question of indicating possession and how to decide whether it's needed. Is it a hard day's night? Shall I be sentenced to five years' hard labor? I'll reveal all in my next post.

A Short Guide to Hyphen Use

Hyphens add an extra spice to general, punctuation-related confusion. Their rules allow exceptions on almost every side, rather than giving hard-and-fast guidance to hapless writers.

While there are exceptions to most of the rules that govern hyphens, you should know the general guidelines. You use them to compound words that have not been accepted as a single word. Thus, mother-in-law, head-to-head, mom-and-pop, and often-requested require hyphens. Except that the last example is hyphenated only when used as an adjective.

Here we come to the crux of the matter. You hyphenate a noun that contains a prepositional phrase, but not if the phrase modifies the noun. “Director of marketing” would not be hyphenated, as “of marketing” explains what the subject directs.

In contrast, a work-at-home dad needs his hyphens. “Work-at-home” modifies “dad” and acts as a single word in this example. You may have difficulty walking that fine line, at first. A little practice will help you decipher whether your phrase acts as a word.

A noun that functions in two or more roles also requires a hyphen between them. A writer-actor-director serves three functions (well or not) in the staging of a play and thus has earned his or her hyphens.

You use a hyphen when attaching a prefix to a proper noun. Anti-American sentiment, post-Reagan era, and quasi-French cuisine all must be hyphenated. Words that begin with ex-, all-, or self- also demand a hyphen. “The all-access pass that her ex-boyfriend left allowed her to act self-assured backstage.”

You also add a hyphen between some words comprised of a single letter and an actual word, such as T-shirt and X-ray. You don't, however, hyphenate I beam or T square. I could find no reason, other than conventional use, for the hyphenation difference between T-shirt and T square.

One more type of word requires hyphens: the compound number. When you write out two-digit numbers or the last two integers of a longer number, you add a hyphen between the words. Thus, I am writing this on the twenty-third day of February.

If you have some examples or other ways in which to use hyphens, please share them. If you have a terrific mnemonic device for remembering or figuring out how and where to use them, for the love of all that is holy, please post them below. Thank you!

Connecting Independent Clauses: Commas Versus Semicolons

Conjunctions are those useful little words that link together parts of your sentence. They tell your readers the relationship between two things, be they clauses or single words.

Some conjunctions require the use of a comma. I have already written about the Oxford comma, that oft-maligned comma at the end of a list, but there are other guidelines for using commas and conjunctions together.

Independent clauses (those that could stand on their own as a sentence) require either a coodinating conjunction or an independent marker word to join them to another independent clause. The former are the FANBOYS—for, and, nor, but, or, ye, and so—and the latter are words like moreover, further or furthermore, and however.

Independent marker conjunctions are used at the beginning of an independent clause, hence the name. You use them to “mark” the clause as stand-alone and to indicate the relationship to the other clause(s) in the sentence. “I could have danced all night; however, my feet were killing me.” You join two such clauses with a semi-colon.

Coordinating conjunctions demand only a comma. “I would have danced all night, but my toes were pinched after half an hour.”

When writing for the web, shorter sentences work better. Unless your independent clauses are so closely related or so short that separating them weakens your piece, split them up. If you can't, or would prefer not, to do so, make sure you use the correct punctuation for your conjunction.

Sometime in the next week I'll address conjunctions and dependent clauses. I know, you're all atwitter, but good things come to those who wait. Happy New Year!

Back to Basics: Interjections!

Interjections present a challenge for those enamored of grammar. They stand alone, rogue fragments that leap out from sentences to express an overflow of feeling. Woo hoo! Great Scott! In your face!

While these “sentences” don't follow the basic rules of grammar (and may not even be words), they nonetheless comply. By their nature, interjections defy requirements for subjects and verbs. You use them to convey strong emotion to your readers.

Be cautious in using them, however. "What?!" you say. "I love those little bursts of feeling!" When used excessively, though, interjections make you sound overwrought, positively hysterical. Reserve them for emphasis and you won't be beating your readers over the head with the emotions of your hero.

Certainly, having the knife slip when cutting oneself free from ones bonds merits a hearty, “Damn!” or at least an, “Ow!” But cute catch phrases like, “Holy fishcakes, Batman!” are best reserved for cheesy television shows and poorly-written novels. You can do better than that.

Saving interjections for emergencies gives them much more impact. You subject may be an excitable person, but if you show that in your writing then their rare verbal explosions will convey the direness of the situation more clearly.

If you find yourself liberally sprinkling your writing with exclamation points, look for wild interjections that make your character appear certifiable. Knock those out and tell your reader what's happening, instead. It will make the story more powerful and the hero more believable. Unless you're writing about Homer Simpson, that is.

Quotation Marks and Dialog

“Look, “ I said to myself. “Lord Matt has left me not one but two topics for exploration in response to yesterday's post. He is truly a gentleman and a scholar.

I hope other will follow his example. I shall thank him properly by addressing quotation marks and dialog posthaste!” And so I am. (I bet you didn't know that I could talk in hyperlinks.)

Quotation marks and dialog offer punctuation challenges because people don't speak like they write. They interrupt each other—and themselves—and they often commit grammatical errors. The basic rule is thus: start and end your speech with a double quotation mark, including the finishing punctuation inside the final mark. Use commas when inserting the “said” designation.

That sounds simple enough, but there is more to writing dialog. You don't want to begin or end every sentence with “Bob said” and “Fred replied”. Your dialog will be stilted if you create a beginning phrase for your character every time he or she speaks, so that the comma falls neatly into an opening for you. Long sentences without speech attribution may confuse your reader if they can't figure out which character is talking.

As with many writing style problems, variety will improve your piece. You can find opportunities to skip specifying the speaker altogether, when the story makes it clear without your help. Begin some sentences with a speech tag and find places to insert the tag mid-sentence in others. Put the tag at the end of short sentences, either in the middle of a speech or when the character only has something short to say.

If you find your character giving a speech, the quote may extend over two or ten paragraphs. When you start a new paragraph without ending a quote, leave the closing quotation mark off the last sentence of the paragraph. Begin the next paragraph with a quotation mark. Continue this method until your source or character has has their say, then close the quotation.

You can emphasize a particular part of the quote by placing the speech tag just after it. Should your character wish to declaim, “I know that the answer to your problem lies just over that hill,” and should you wish to emphasize how strongly he believes that he knows it, you could writing it as follows. “I know,” said Jack, “that the answer to your problem lies just over that hill.” Adding the pause cues your reader that Jack emphasized the separated portion.

Should your quotation trail off, an ellipsis suffices to finish the sentence before closing the quotes. If your rude characters interrupt each other or if the speaker has though better of saying something aloud, use a dash to indicate that the speech has been truncated. I've lost sight of the original question by now, so if I missed the mark here please let me know.

Don't Neglect Commas in Lists

I goty into another lovely set of langauge and writing discussions in the Writers' Workshop at Helium today. The topic that got me going was comma use in lists.

While I added my two cents to the thread, I don't like to expound at great length during a discussion. I hate to come off sounding like a know-it-all both because it opens me up to nit-pickery and because really hammering a topic from a soapbox tends to shut off further conversation.

All of which means that I am going to give my opinion on the subject now.

Traditionally, commas are used to separate items in a list and a conjunction is used before the last to indicate that it is, well, the last. Thus, I write, “Shelly put containers of orange, apple, and cranberry juice in her cart.”

Contrast that with, “Shelly put containers of orange, apple and cranberry juice in her cart.” Does this mean that she put more than one container of the same juice blend in her cart, two different kinds (orange and cranberry-apple), or that she chose three kinds of juice? That little comma makes a difference.

People commonly ignore the last comma in a list on the grounds that they don't need it unless the items in the list are complex. I disagree on two grounds. First, why have a rule that only applies sometimes. Either the rule holds true or it doesn't. Second, why waste time determining how complex your list has to be before it requires a comma? Simply use one every time and you will have a comma when you need one.

I admit to being a traditionalist on matters of grammar, but in this case the traditional method makes more sense. Comma overuse has created an atmosphere where writers abolish them at every opportunity. I agree with the impulse but, in this case, I think the poor little comma should be allowed to remain.

Fun Search Terms for This Blog

I reviewed my recent statistics this morning and discovered that this blog gets Google juice on some good topics. My posts on –tion words are my biggest draw, as people search every day, in a dozen different ways, for more information on them.

The terms on the list that I best liked seeing were “be sarcastic when defining sarcasm” and “how to make a sentence sarcastic”, plus three other mentions of sarcasm. I’m so proud. [sniff] Actually, I rank high for sarcasm because of my recent post on punctuation intended to indicate sarcasm and intentional ambiguity. Then again, I’m a bit of a…sarcastic individual.

I felt the need to run “example sentence using the word feckless” for myself. I came up second in the search results for this one, from actually using the word in my most-visited post on -tion words. Apparently feckless doesn’t get much use these days.

Folks have also found me through my posts on FANBOYS. I must admit to a certain amusement when using that term. It works beautifully as a memnotic device for remembering the basic conjunctions but also makes it sound like I’m writing about boy bands when I use it in headlines.

About the Ellipsis ...

I thought I’d write about a simple topic today: the ellipsis. What could be easier than explaining that you use three periods to indicate that you’ve left something out of a citation or that a sentence otherwise has not been completed?

To my chagrin, I discovered that things are not as simple as they seem. I have been laboring under the delusion that you do not need spaces on either side of an ellipsis, but some style manuals insist that I am mistaken. I thought that it was incorrect to add a period to an ellipsis at the end of a sentence, apparently yet another mistake unless the sentence trails off without an end.

You can understand this better with an example or two. Should you feel it necessary, for instance, to quote the preceding paragraph, you may wish to exclude the more excusatory phrases. Thus, you could write “… things are not as simple as they seem.” You’d be correct, too. Then again, I would have written it that way, too, but for the space after it.

You can also write that “… things are not as simple as they seem. … some style manuals insist that I am mistaken.” That’s a pretty silly thing to quote, but stylistically you would be correct.

You could quote me as writing that “I thought that it was incorrect to add a period to an ellipsis at the end of a sentence … .” Here we arrive at my point of confusion. My word processor tells me that I have constructed that punctuation incorrectly. My eye tells me that same. Unfortunately, every reference I could find on-line tells me that this structure is correct. I know, you are as shocked as I, but the truth must be told.

I draw the line, however, at believing that an ellipsis should have spaces between the dots. If your style manual shows ellipses constructed that way, draw a line through those instructions and write, “Nuh uh!” above them. If your editor or teacher questions you, tell them that I told you to and that should be sufficient. Now go leave things out, would you?

Make Friends with Commas

One of you lovely readers petitioned for more information on comma use and I happily am complying with that request today. This much-abused piece of punctuation (overworked by me as much as many) can use all of the help it can get.

At cloudnet.com I found a straightforward page of comma and semicolon rules. Writers know most of these rules already, like using a comma to set off a clause with one of the FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so). The rules that govern how you separate phrases give people the most trouble.

If you find yourself liberally sprinkling commas over every sentence, try a trick that has helped me rein in my excesses: write without any commas. Once you’ve got a paragraph written, go back and insert only those commas that your sentence structures require.

Many writers insert commas where they pause in their thoughts when composing sentences. Break that habit and you will find that you use far fewer commas, and that you can see how to use them correctly. Remove the comma clutter from your writing and review the rules on the link above. The humble comma can be your friend instead of a foe.

Why You Don't Need More Punctuation Marks

As promised, I am writing about lesser-known punctuation marks again. While I am a fan of the interrobang, as posted in yesterday’s ramblings on obscure punctuation marks, I doubt the need for the sarcasm and irony marks in more formal writing.

If you mean your piece to be humorous, whether through sarcasm or a more direct way, your words should carry that meaning. When you feel the need to use a mark to tell your reader that you are “just kidding” either you have not written well enough to make your point clear or you are insulting the intelligence of your reader. Smilies or their punctuation equivalent cannot replace clear, evocative writing in an article or fictional story.

During communication on fora and via instant messaging, however, those marks could be the difference between making yourself understood and upsetting someone needlessly. These media make down-and-dirty communication possible, but the temptation to post without proofreading for meaning and implication combines with the lack of physical and tonal clues to meaning to make sarcasm difficult to detect. Even e-mail can benefit from the clarity that such marks bring.

Articles and fiction that you mean for people to read months and years after their composition, however, require more finesse than a simple crooked exclamation point or tilde can provide. If you cannot create sentences and paragraphs that make clear your tongue-in-cheek take then work on your writing and build your vocabulary. More punctuation marks won’t strengthen your characters or descriptions.

Obscure, Sarcastic, and Ambiguous: Punctuation Helps Make Your Point

Today we focus on obscure punctuation. I can no longer hold in my desire to talk about the interrobang. It seems to me that people would consider this to be one of the most useful of punctuation marks for posting in fora, especially those where heated discussions commonly occur.

If you didn't check the above description (or read Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss) let me explain in brief. The interrobang is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point. It is used to express an emphatic emotion like surprise or anger while asking a question. I have always used “?!” to represent an interrobang. I was unaware that offer a custom version, as listed in the above link.

Now that you know how to inject emotion into your questions, you are ready to learn how to indicate that you meant to be ironic as well. Yes, there are marks for that, as well, although none so well-regarded as the interrobang. Underware has designed their own version. You would need to combine the exclamatory power of this version with the questioning strength of the reversed question mark. I'll write about my opinion on using these tomorrow, since this post is about punctuation marks in general.

If these fail to fill your obscurity meter, consider the mark for intentional ambiguity. I like the mark, but I'm not so sure it's needed. Most folks write ambiguous sentences accidentally and generally don't realize it until someone has leapt to the wrong conclusion. (I need a mark that combines ambiguity and sarcasm for the end of this sentence!)

In my quest for other underused punctuation marks, I discovered William J Buchholz's snerk-worthy piece from the November, 1979 issue of the Phi Beta Kappan. Read the section on colon use, if you would be so kind; then read through my post titles. Clearly, I have established my intellectual authority without even trying.~

You Learn Something New: Em-Dashes

I was incommunicado for a couple of days, without any computer access at all. I think I will recover fully, but it was touch-and-go last night. Please accept this complicated topic as reparations.

In response to a comment on my recent anti-semicolon post, I researched the difference between using an en-dash (a short dash that looks like a hyphen but is not a hyphen) rather than an em-dash (a long dash often represented by a double-hyphen). I came across a discussion about various type styles and dashes. The posts were written five years ago, but the discussion gives some good history.

I then found a surprising page about the en-dash versus em-dashes in singles, pairs, and trios. Each version has an appropriate set of uses and a special character. I had no idea!

I use en-dashes (hyphen-length) for em-dashes (double-hyphens that many word processors replace with a special character. I have done that for years because I think—as do several folks in the first discussion—that the double-hyphen construction is unattractive.

The special character (as seen in the previous sentence) does not appear magically on bulletin boards and fora. To avoid the ugly version, I began using the [space]hyphen[space] construction that you can see in other posts on this blog. MS Word automatically replaces that with an em-dash with a space on either side.

The problem is that the special character does not translate into a noticeably different-length dash in most HTML editors like the one for this blog. I never thought to review their appearance as posted rather than in the editor. The way I use en-dashes gets the point across but is technically incorrect. I am trying to break my bad habit, and thanks to Carradee for the “heads up”.

Does anyone else have a bad habit to explore, my oversight or yours?