Ani wrote:The -- is how you make a dash. At least it used to be how you to did it before fancy word processing software changed the length automatically. The single - is a hyphen.
Serpent wrote:Yes but -- isn't a dash. If we're so keen on that, we can use proper dashes. Otherwise - is okay. Hyphen or dash depending on whether there are spaces around it.
OK, I'm going to engage in some typography geeking. This is a language-learning blog, so this is almost on topic.
If you're using an actual typewriter, there's just one kind of dash—the hyphen. You can use either one or two of them. You also have option of starting a holy war over whether you should put spaces on either side of "--". (Personally? I think that spaces around double dashes is ugly. But others will disagree. Heatedly.)
But let's assume that you have something better than a typewriter: Either an honest-to-goodness printing press, or a computer less than 20 years old. In this case, there are three main kinds of dashes:
- The hyphen: "-". (Unicode character U+002D "hyphen-minus". If you're about to object and mention U+2010 "hyphen" or U+2212 "minus", seek help immediately.) The hyphen is normally used to separate the parts of compound words, such as "honest-to-goodness" above.
- The en dash: "–". (U+2013) This is normally used to specify a range of things: "In the years 2007–2017, we've had 5–10 servers." It can also be used for compound words that are made up of other compound words, such as "Pre–Sarbanes-Oxley, corporate accounting was simpler."
- The em dash: "—". (U+2014) This is used to separate parts of sentences—like this—or to represent interrupted speech.
For more information, see the
Chicago Manual of Style and
this article.
Now, assuming you have real em dashes, this leaves the question of whether or not you should surround them with spaces. In many typeset books, you'll see the em dash used
without spaces. But if you look at English-language newspapers, you'll typically see spaces on both sides. You can also split the difference and set off your em dashes with either hair spaces (U+200A) or thin spaces (U+2009).
There is also a group of people who replace em dashes with "thin space, en dash, thin space", but they're wild typographic radicals. Personally, I use the basic rules above (which you can also find in the
Chicago Manual of Style) and I do not put spaces around my dashes. Someday, I might indulge myself recklessly and see how they look with thin spaces, but let's not overdo it.
Now, for extra fun, these rules are only for English, and may vary in other languages! French actually has different typographical conventions for many sorts of punctuation. For example,
you put spaces before exclamation marks, question marks and colons in French. (And yes, I actually looked up French punctuation rules a long time ago. I would never admit that anywhere but on this forum, but I'm willing to confess here.)