Hyphens, Dashes, and Slashes
Explore the proper use of hyphens dashes and slashes to enhance sentence clarity. Understand rules for compound adjectives number ranges abrupt shifts and word replacements to write more precise and reader-friendly text.
Hyphens, dashes, and slashes are a useful punctuation tool to divide words and make sentences easier to follow for the reader. In this lesson, we will go over what situations require each form of punctuation.
Hyphen
Hyphens are most commonly used to create compound adjective. Compound adjectives join two or more words together to create an adjective that comes before a noun. Hyphens are also used to join numbers. Let’s look at some examples.
- Example → “Post-modern literature”
- Example → “Seventeenth-century painting”
- Example → “Mother-in-law”
Note that in the examples above, the hyphen creates a compound adjective that goes right before the noun.
- Example → “Sixty-six”
- Example → “Thirty-five”
The rule in English is to ...