In this series of blogs, Writing Woes, I will share with you some amusing insights on the mistakes people inadvertently make when writing, based on my work as a professional tutor and as a writer for Summit University. (You can visit my tutoring website here: https://lynnthetutor.com)
Here we go!
Lynn’s Law for Proper Hyphenating
… It was a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater.
Huh? I’ve always wondered about that lyric. Is it a purple alien that eats people? Or is it an alien that eats purple people? (If the latter, it must be very hungry, but perhaps that explains why the singer was not eaten.) So what is the solution?
A hyphen is badly needed.
It could be a flying-purple people eater or a flying purple-people eater. We may never know.
Lynn’s Law for the use of hyphens is simple: If adding hyphens between descriptive words clarifies your meaning, add them; otherwise don’t.
There are oodles of rules about using hyphens between words, however, common sense and the habit of reading your drafts with a literal mind will set you right 95%* of the time. (*You know, of course, that 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot.)
Let’s look at some examples:
He loved the day to day work.
At a quick glance our eyes stop at the first iteration of “day.” It is an unkind deception of your reader. (Yes, a reader can figure it out, but a better writer would make his meaning clear from the beginning.) Fix it this way:
He loved the day-to-day work.
It was the first time worn relic he had discovered.
See how the reader has to pause after first time? We are used to that phrase. We don’t expect to see the word worn after it. If you love your readers, do this:
It was the first time-worn relic he had discovered.
Sadly, there are so very many rules about this that you can spend an hour reading them. The challenge then is to remember them all and be good enough at recognizing parts of speech and sentence construction to figure out when to apply each rule. If that is not challenging enough, I have discovered, when studying all these rules, that occasionally, even within the statement of the rule, the rule itself is violated! And we see violations of some of these rules all the time in print. What’s a writer to do?
Just remember Lynn’s Law. If adding hyphens between descriptive words clarifies your meaning, add them; otherwise don’t.
Lynn The Tutor
(My tutoring website: https://lynnthetutor.com)
This really clarifies something that has often confused me, as to when to do it and when not to do it. I like this a lot.