My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English

Smart Alec: An en-dash is named for the width of a typesetter’s n key. The
longer em-dash is the width of a typesetter’s m key.
J
OINED-UP WRITING
(
OR
, H
YPHENS
)
‘A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base proud, shallow,
beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy-worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson glass-gazing super serviceable finical
rogue, one-trunk-inheriting slave.’
S
HAKESPEARE
, King Lear
A hyphen looks like a short dash, but isn’t used in the same way. Its function is
to  join  two  or  more  words  to  show  that  they  belong  to  each  other,  and  also  to
separate syllables when necessary – for example, when a word is split in half at
the  end  of  a  line  of  type.  Hyphens  are  rather  going  out  of  fashion  these  days,
particularly  in  American  English,  but  they  are  often  useful  (and  sometimes
essential) in clarifying meaning.
Hang glider pilots in training today.
He wore a new dress shirt and jacket to the dinner.
Fox hunting supporters.
It was a long overdue visit.
They were speaking a nonnative language.
Thirteen year-old boys sit Common Entrance exams here tomorrow.
She went through it with a fine tooth-comb.
In the above examples, common sense tells us where a hyphen would be useful.
(Fine-toothed comb , please! )
Some hyphen rules:
  Be careful with compound adjectives. Hyphenating these incorrectly, or not
hyphenating them at all, can cause confusion because we don’t know which
words go together: Thirteen-year-old boys sit Common Entrance exams;
thirteen year-old boys would be far too young, and are an unlucky number

---

anyway.
  A hyphen is unnecessary if other punctuation makes the meaning clear
without it:
The old English teacher was a dreadful bore .
The Old English teacher was a dreadful bore.
The fact that the word old is capitalized in the second sentence makes all the
difference: in the first sentence we know that the teacher is old; in the second,
it is the English that is old.