Time to Stop Getting Them Confused: Hyphens and Dashes
The Hyphen (-) is a punctuation mark used to join words and separate syllabes of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation.
It has several a purposes, such as:
Connecting two or three words (and/or numbers) into a single concept, generally an adjective:
The family’s money-saving measures have been helping them to build their savings.
Spencer is a 15-year-old boy.
They’re also necessary to join numbers (e.g. twenty-two) and as substitutes for ‘to’ when discussing range of value (e.g. the high temperature will be 87-89 degrees), although it is less common and considered informal. In fact, it is preferred to use en-dashes.
A good post on how to use hyphens would be this one and this website.
xx
The dash is a punctuation mark that is similar to a hyphen or minus sign but that differs from both of these symbols primarily in length and function.
The most common versions of the dash are the en-dash (–) and the em-dash (—)
These are the dashes you use in writing to denote breaks in the sentence, or as parenthesis. The only difference is that when you use an en-dash, you use it with spaces. When it comes to em-dashes, you use them without.
It’s been raining all day – it’s been cloudy too, in fact.
It’s been raining all day–it’s been cloudy too, in fact.
The en-dash, like I said previously, is also more used for range of value. Instead of writing “from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.”, one could use "1:00–2:00 p. m.“
xx
While there are many more applications to the dashes, and actually other types of dashes as well, they’re not as well-known or used in everyday writing. Style usually varies, too, so I tried to keep it basic.
The em-dash is a favorite of mine to break sentences, and while it is a great tool to alter the pace of your story, be careful not to overuse it.
-Alex