I cannot find the long one of these - on my keyboard. the one for splitting up bits of sentence rather than the one for connecting words. Stupid keyboard
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Stretched hyphensjongibbsFebruary 8 2009, 12:03:48 UTC
I just had a thought. In Word, the long dash for splitting up a sentence is the hyphen sign, but as soon as you put in a space after the subsequent word, it stretches, as if by magic.
OK, dashes. This is our house style and we stick to it religiously:
a hyphen is used to connect two words e.g. "risk-averse plaintiffs"
an en-rule (which is the length of a capital N hence the name) is used to connect two names of equal weight, for example the names of two scientists who equally discovered something e.g. "the Diels-Calder reaction"
an em-rule (the length of a capital M) is used to separate parts of sentences - its used much like you would use brackets e.g. "So I got this dress in a charity shop - you know the one by the bus station - and it was, like, so cheap!"
There are two schools of thought on whether the em-rule should be closed up or not (e.g. text-text or text - text) - our house style is to close it up but it looks pants - much better to leave it with a space either side. XXX
en-rule keyboard shortcut is alt+0150 and em-rule is alt+0151
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A sip of poison that unleashes a river of evil.
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Hope that helps.
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a hyphen is used to connect two words e.g. "risk-averse plaintiffs"
an en-rule (which is the length of a capital N hence the name) is used to connect two names of equal weight, for example the names of two scientists who equally discovered something e.g. "the Diels-Calder reaction"
an em-rule (the length of a capital M) is used to separate parts of sentences - its used much like you would use brackets e.g. "So I got this dress in a charity shop - you know the one by the bus station - and it was, like, so cheap!"
There are two schools of thought on whether the em-rule should be closed up or not (e.g. text-text or text - text) - our house style is to close it up but it looks pants - much better to leave it with a space either side.
XXX
en-rule keyboard shortcut is alt+0150 and em-rule is alt+0151
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