- Law 13.
Avoid line-breaking hyphens.
Hyphens are useful little bits of punctuation.
And sometimes they're necessary to
improve readability and help clarify
meaning in your documents.
There are some words like the word
twenty-two that require a hyphen.
And here the hyphen's being used to
eliminate confusion and to help your
readers get a quick grasp on exactly what
the text is trying to say.
But using hyphens to line break words is
not necessary and should be avoided.
So what does that mean?
What are line-breaking hyphens?
Line-breaking hyphens are hyphens that are
automatically added by the software
that you're using.
These hyphens are automatically inserted
when an entire word won't fit at
the end of a line of text.
The software is going to put the
beginning of the word on the line,
maybe a few characters,
then the software adds a hyphen
and then the software continues the rest of
the word on the next line of the paragraph.
And I'm sure you've seen these a lot,
you probably see them all the time.
But here's an example of a paragraph that
contains line-breaking hyphens.
Hyphens that are used as line breaks
are visually unappealing and noisy.
They also break the readers' concentration
and reading rhythm.
You're asking readers to rebuild words
in their mind when these words are being
split across multiple lines of text.
So in short,
line-breaking hyphens are ugly and disruptive
and should be avoided.
So, here's that same paragraph,
the same text we had before
and this time the hyphenation
has been turned off.
And notice how much cleaner
this second example is.
The paragraph looks so much nicer.
It's also easier to read
because words are not being broken
across multiple lines of text.
There may be times when for some reason
you have to use hyphens to line break words
and if that's the case,
make sure you use them correctly
so that they stay out of the way
and are as unobtrusive as possible.
Don't ever hyphenate titles,
subheads or proper names.
Don't allow more than two hyphens
consecutively in a paragraph.
We can probably best see this
through an example.
So here's an example that contains more
than two hyphens consecutively.
You can see that this paragraph is
pretty visually cluttered and pretty noisy
with all of these hyphens.
Don't hyphernate URLs or email addresses.
When hyphens appear in these special
bits of text you're changing the
meaning of the text and introducing errors.
Don't allow your software to make
all the hyphenation decisions.
Modern desktop publishing software
has built-in hyphenation control.
And you need to become familiar with
where those controls are
in the software that you use.
These hyphenation controls are where
you can turn off hyphens completely.
If you have to use hyphens for some reason,
this is also where you can specify
the number of consecutive hyphens
that can appear in a paragraph.
You can even tell the software how many
letters should appear before and after hyphens
by giving it a minimum.
If you're a web designer you can use css
code to turn off automatic hyphenation
on your webpages.
Let's summarize.
Line-breaking hyphens are visually unattractive
and disrupt the flow of a sentence.
For these reasons they should be avoided.
That's law 13,
avoid line-breaking hyphens.