Everybody has their favourite punctuation marks and ones they like less; in fact we have our own list of favourites elsewhere on this blog.

One set of marks which can cause confusion, but can also be of great use in a writer’s arsenal, is the dash family. There are three dashes: the en dash, the em dash and the hyphen. The em dash was so named as it is as wide as an upper case M on a printing press, while the en dash is the width of an upper case N. The hyphen is the oldest dash; its name comes from the Greek huphen meaning ‘together’ because it signifies that words are connected.

Not mixing up your dashes is a great way to make friends with proofreaders as well as sub-editors on magazine and newspaper desks. Not everybody knows their en dash from their em dash so you’ll gain brownie points with some pretty important people if you get them correct!

How and when to use the en dash 

The preferred mark in UK English is the en dash (–). It is particularly useful when you are putting together a single sentence which needs to contain quite a lot of information.

The en dash describes a pause for related material. It can function like a comma, a colon or parenthesis. This mark lets you add information, descriptions or extra facts to a sentence when a comma might cause confusion (see our blog on the Oxford comma); the en dash can also announce an abrupt change in sentence structure, and they have a single space either side of them in this context.

• En dashes are used in place of commas or parentheses to surround related information in a sentence:

The relentless nature of the ultramarathon – 100 miles in 24 hours – means that very few people make it to the end of the route without injury.

In the example above you can see that without the dashes the writer would have to use more than one sentence, or explain the additions with “because” or “which is”/”which are” or another linking phrase.

• You can link different clauses with an en dash:

The race was won by a woman called Edith Easson from Essex – the first person from the south-east of England to enter the competition in over a century.

• En dashes can also introduce a list:

The terrain was rough – including rivers, bogs and desert – so the competitors had to wear appropriate footwear.

• Or if you want to switch the sentence around, the en dash may introduce a summary statement that follows a series of words or phrases:

Rain, hail, snow, slush and ice – the weather conditions continued to punish the competitors right down to the final stretch of the course.

• Finally, an en dash can precede the name of an author at the end of a quote:

“I love the en dash because it is so versatile and allows for brevity” – Holly Kirkwood

• The en dash is also used, without spaces, between numbers or dates to indicate a range (“up to and including”).

The library is open 6.00am–8.00pm.

How and when to use the hyphen

Hyphens have a variety of uses, most of which are to indicate that words are linked

• You can use hyphens to link elements in compound words, which are two words that work together to function like one adjective. However the hyphenation only works if the compound words come before the thing they are describing.

According to the online reviews, it was not a very child-friendly hotel. 

• A hyphen allows for a prefix or suffix:

The soldier fondly remembered his pre-war days

• A hyphen can also indicate an end of line word division, as its original use intended:

I wanted to make sure I made it on time to the coffee shop be-

cause I didn’t want them to close before I had my last latte of the day. 

How and when to use the em dash

The em dash is used in US English, with no spaces either side, in the same way an en dash is employed in UK English. So if you’re writing for the US just use the longer dash not the shorter one and close up those spaces.

Image by Susan Weber on Unsplash