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Hyphens: An Advanced Course

Last time, I offered this rule of thumb for hyphens: If the phrase that you are tempted to hyphenate is the last thing in the sentence, don't hyphenate it. If it is not the last thing in the sentence, hyphenate it.

Of course, the rule of thumb doesn’t tell the whole story. To be more accurate in your hyphen use, you need to look at the phrase’s relationship to the noun(s) in the sentence.

Phrases that Come Before a Noun

If a phrase comes before a noun, and the phrase describes the noun (like an adjective does), then hyphenate it. Examples:

A well-fed dog

A full-time employee

Cutting-edge technology

A three-year-old girl

A fit-to-be-tied animal

The only exceptions to this are if the first word in the phrase is very or ends in -ly.

A barely legal coed

A very funny joke

Phrases that Come After a Noun

If a phrase comes after a noun, and the phrase describes the noun (like an adjective does), then it does not need a hyphen.

Let’s take the same examples used above, and move them so that the phrase comes after the noun. Now they need no hyphen:

That dog sure is well fed, bless his heart.

All of our employees are full time, except the ones who work part time.

The technology in our house is cutting edge.

My daughter is three years old, but she thinks she is sixteen.

When we took its food away, that caterpillar was fit to be tied.

If it didn’t have a hyphen before, don’t add one now:

I’d date her, but she is barely legal.

The jokes he tells are very funny.

Noun Phrases that Stand Alone

If a noun phrase stands alone (in other words, it’s not modifying another noun), it usually doesn’t need a hyphen. Example:

She is an artist who works with mixed media.

Exception: If the meaning of the phrase would be unclear without a hyphen, then use a hyphen to make it clearer. Examples:

The mayor met with big-box-company leaders. (the leaders of big box companies)

The mayor met with big box-company leaders. (the big leaders of box companies)

The mayor met with big box company leaders. (with no hyphens, the meaning is a mystery)

My next blog will be about more-fun topics. (topics that are less dull)

My next blog will be about more fun topics. (a greater number of fun topics)

That girl is quick-witted. (She has a quick wit)

That girl is quick witted. (Same meaning, but without the hyphen, you first read “That girl is quick,” and then when you read on, you see “witted,” and you have to go back and fix what you thought it meant. A hyphen saves you all that work.)

Non-Noun Uses

Often, I see people hyphenating verb phrases, such as my alderman declaring that summer had kicked-off. This one is easier. You almost never need to hyphenate a verb phrase. The few exceptions to this rule (such as double-space) can be looked up in the dictionary.

Let’s take check in as an example.

Let’s get to the conference early so we can check-in. (WRONG!)

Let’s get to the conference early so we can check in. (CORRECT!)

On the other hand, as we’ve learned above, if that same phrase appeared before a noun and described that noun, then it would get a hyphen.

We ran into our friends at the check-in desk.

And Now...


If you can find the mistake in this sentence, then you’ve earned your diploma in Hyphen Studies!

The good-looking people who read Edit This Blog are incredibly-smart.

Hyphens: An Introductory Course

So I got my alderman's e-newsletter the other day.

It announced that "Summer has officially kicked-off" in our ward.

If you're a proofreader, then you are cringing like I cringed. If you're not, then you may be wondering, "So what's the problem? Those words all look fine to me."

Hyphen usage can be a tough one. It's not like we are drilled on it in school, like we are with spelling. And MS Word's grammar checker is fairly useless when it comes to hyphens.

Hyphen Headaches?

When should you use a hyphen, and when should you leave it out? It depends on how the phrase is used in a sentence: verb, adjective, noun, adverb, or something else. It also depends on where in the sentence the phrase occurs.

But hyphens are not as hard as you may think. In 90% of cases, you can just look it up in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster is great about including the hyphen in phrases where it's correct to use one. Like a good English teacher, Merriam-Webster usually provides examples of the word/phrase used in a sentence so that you can have context and be totally sure. (Side note: Merriam-Webster's beautifully short URL contains a hyphen: www.m-w.com).

Rule of Thumb

If you don't have a dictionary handy, here's a rule of thumb that works in many cases. If the phrase that you are tempted to hyphenate is the last thing in the sentence, don't hyphenate it. If it it is not the last thing in the sentence, hyphenate it.

Let's take the phrase "after hours" as an example.

• The Cat Scratch Club is open after hours. END OF THE SENTENCE = NO HYPHEN.
  
  Here, after hours is being used as an adverb. Adverbs describe verbs. This one describes open. When is the club open? After hours.
  

• My friends and I had consumed several gallons of Red Bull, so we went to an after-hours club after the bars closed. NOT AT THE END OF THE SENTENCE = HYPHEN.
  
  Here, after hours is being used as an adjective. What kind of club? An after-hours club.
  

Kicked Off

Following this rule of thumb, we now see why my alderman's ghostwriter had it wrong. In the sentence "Summer has officially kicked-off," the hyphenated phrase is at the end of the sentence. Verdict: NO HYPHEN. It should have been "Summer has officially kicked off."

Advanced Hyphen Usage

If you want to become a Hyphen God/Goddess, tune in next time, where I take the rule of thumb one step further and lay down the expert rules.

Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance

Glassdoor.com recently published its list of the Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance, as rated by reviewers on its site, people who have worked at the companies themselves.

Cited most often at the highest-rated companies: flexible work hours and generous time off. In other words, the things that let employees be human beings instead of cogs in a corporate wheel.

The winning companies run the gamut as far as industries and job types: manufacturing, airlines, consulting, pharmaceuticals, and services. It goes to show that work-life balance isn't about what type of job you have -- it's about who's running the place and what their values are.

In my book, this is yet another win for the internet. Previously, only journalists and magazines like FastCompany and BusinessWeek created "top places to work" lists. Now you can get the ratings straight from the (work)horse's mouth.

I've discussed Glassdoor.com in the past. I'm glad to see that the site is thriving and getting its name out there.

Glassdoor also publishes a Top 50 Best Places to Work list. Not surprisingly, it includes most of the companies that got named in the Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance list.

When Science Is Art

Can you love science – maybe even be a scientist yourself – and still be awed, even spiritually moved, by natural wonders?

No one answers that question better than my friend and colleague Sue Baugh. Her new book Echoes of Earth, which comes out this fall, is filled to the brim with photos of ancient mineral sites. These colorful, dramatic rock formations are a geologist’s dream. But the book deals equally with what these sites mean to us as living beings, and their potential to inspire us.

The Book

Echoes of Earth has been Sue’s passion and labor of love for several years. She and her co-author traveled to far corners of the earth (including Greenland, Australia, the Northwest Territories) to take these stunning photographs. Check them out (and order the book) at their website, www.wildstonearts.com.

I wish I could share what it is like to watch Sue present. Last weekend, to an audience at Fritz Pastry in Chicago, she showed slides of her photographs and her journey around the world, and shared the lessons she’s taken from that journey. Her sense of wonder and appreciation of these natural phenomena is contagious.

And, I confess, the decorator in me is salivating over the textiles being created as companion products. If those hoodies get finished anytime soon, Sue, my birthday is in September!

Can Science Be Spiritual?

I’ve always loved science. It’s why I majored in biology. I love knowing how things work, and how we can create medicine using natural processes and plants.

Science – and nature itself – can often seem dry, cold, clinical, and dispassionate (which is one reason I left the lab to pursue more creative lines of work). Yet nothing on this earth is more spiritual to me than standing in the middle of a vast forest, or on the side of a mountain. Nowhere on earth do I feel more inspired, more humbled, more imaginative, or more at peace. I’ve never been able to explain that. I just know it’s true.

I think Sue gets that. Her book covers the science: how minerals create colors and patterns in stone; how continental drift created similar geological sites on opposite ends of the planet; how colossal shifts in the earth’s crust can turn million-ton slabs of rock onto their sides so that horizontal deposits now point at the sky. But ultimately it’s about what happens to you when you witness these phenomena. It’s about how taking yourself into nature itself creates an experience that is incomparable with anything man-made.

I encourage you to check it out. I think you’ll like it.

Your Favorite Books, Ultra Condensed

If editors had contests, one of them might be, "How concise can you make this sentence/paragraph/novel?" In other words, how few words can you boil a concept down into while still retaining its essential meaning? Seventeen? How about twelve? FOUR! We have a winner!

OK, so it's not THAT exciting. You won't be seeing an Extreme Editing reality TV competition anytime soon.

But I have to give props to Better Book Titles for making it fun (and with picture goodness). In their own words:

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

For example, the classic Charlotte's Web was condensed to: "Spiders Make Great Publicists." Love it.

Outsourcing Children's Textbooks

When you were a kid, did you ever wonder who wrote the articles, study guides, and quizzes that were in your school textbooks?

Probably not. If you gave it any thought at all, you likely thought it was all written by a teacher even more boring than your own.

But now that we're adults, we should think about it. Why? Because today, much of the content of school textbooks gets outsourced to foreign countries.

It's true. A large amount of textbook content is written by non-native English speakers because American publishing houses don't want to pay higher wages to American writers.

I will be covering this subject again soon. It's too long for just one post. But for now, I'll share a blurb from a website of one particular offshore company (thanks to one of my colleagues for passing it along). This company says it provides "end-to-end content management" for schools and other clients. And yet its own website is a compelling advertisement for why you shouldn't hire them for such work. For the record, this blurb contains:

• Singular/plural errors: 2
  
• Comma misuse/omission: 4
  
• Hyphen misuse/omission: 3
  
• Erroneous capitalization: 7
• Incorrect word choice (e.g. "Corporates" instead of "Corporations"): 3
  
• Run-on sentences: 2

Would you want this company teaching your kid how to read and write?

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