- Law 27.
Show Ranges Using En Dashes.
What is an en dash?
An en dash is a dash that's larger than an hyphen
but smaller than an em dash.
Now, many people aren't familiar with en dashes
and when to use them.
When people use typewriters, the choices are
really between using a hyphen or a double hyphen.
There's nothing in between, on a typewriter.
But the en dash is that in-between character
and it does have important uses.
What are those uses?
And when should you use an en dash?
Well, most commonly, en dashes are used to show
ranges of time, ranges of duration
or ranges of distance.
So, for example, if you're talking about
January through June,
2 o'clock to 5 o'clock,
Monday through Friday,
2001 to 2003,
pages 230 to 255
or the Florida-Texas Flight Path.
In all of those cases, we're talking about ranges
and an en dash is the proper character to use.
En dashes are also used to join words
when at least one word is an open compound.
Open compounds are usually
two-word proper nouns.
So, for example, if you're talking about
the New York-New Jersey Border or
Puerto Rican-United States Agreement or
the North Carolina-Virginia Border.
You can see, in all of those examples, we're joining
words and phrases and at least one word
is an open compound.
En dashes are also used to join
hyphenated compounds.
So, if you have two hyphenated words
that you're joining together, we would use
an en dash to do the joining.
For example, post-Jacksonian-pre-Nixonian politics,
you've got two hyphenated phrases and
an en dash in between to join them.
You should not add spaces around an en dash
but, depending on the typeface that you're using,
the size of the typeface and the characters
that are surrounding the dash, you may need to add
what are called thin spaces on either side
of an en dash.
A good rule of thumb is that if the dash touches,
or almost touches, any character then
a thin space is needed.
A thin space is really just what it sounds like
it's a space that's thinner than normal
and a thin space is actually about a fifth
of an em wide.
Now, depending on the software they are using,
you may be able to insert a thin space
just by using a menu or maybe a menu choice,
but, if that's not the case, you can create
your own thin spaces by typing a space
highlighting it and making it smaller.
How do you create en dashes?
Well, en dashes are not characters that are
included on a standard keyboard.
So, they're considered special characters.
You're going to need to use a special menu
or a special key combination in order
to create an en dash.
On a Mac, you can create an en dash by
holding down the option key and typing a hyphen.
If you're using a computer with the
Windows operating system, you can create
an en dash by holding down the alt key
and typing the numbers 0 1 5 0.
In HTML, if you're a web designer,
the character entity for an en dash is this:
Let's summarize.
Stop using hyphens when you really need
an en dash instead.
Use an en dash when you want to
show ranges, join open compound words,
or join hyphenated compounds.
En dashes are easy to insert into your documents
and they will make your documents more professional.
That's Law 27.
Show Ranges Using En Dashes.