How to Write Right: Dashed Hopes

Dashed Hopes

I spend a lot of my time as a copyeditor fiddling with hyphens: adding them, taking them away, changing them to en-dashes (the medium-length dash used for number ranges; in City Arts, we also use them in place of em-dashes, the longest dash). I’ve noticed that writers get particularly confused over where to stop hyphenating. This comes up a lot with ages:

The fifty-three year old author paused to consider the question.

In this example, the hyphenation stops too soon, a phenomenon I call hyphen hesitancy. The entire phrase “fifty-three-year-old” should be hyphenated. Why? Because collectively it forms one adjective modifying the noun, “author.”

Then there’s this variant:

The sixteen year-olds visit the Skate Park most afternoons.

Here the hyphen skips the first element. “Sixteen-year-olds” forms a single noun phrase that needs to be joined together. If you only hyphenate “year-olds,” then that is your noun, with “sixteen” as the adjective modifying it. This changes the meaning of the phrase. Suddenly, you’re not talking about teenagers: you’re describing a crowd of year-old babies – sixteen of them in all.

Think of hyphenation as a sort of group hug. A noun or adjective can be several words long: identify where it starts and where it ends, and pull the whole thing together into the embrace of hyphens. If you leave words out of the hyphen chain, they just hang around awkwardly, part of the phrase but not properly connected to it. •