About those dashes ...

I was never much of a dash man--or boy. My dad was. A champion sprinter in his Oregon high school, he was uncatchable out in the yard in our little football games--unless, of course, he let us catch him. And he often did. (Good man, my dad.) It was fun catching him--but frustrating because I knew he'd just let me!

Yes, I was somewhat slow afoot and cursed throughout high school the genetic failure of my parents to pass along to me the Speed Gene. Neither my younger brother (Dave) nor I got it.

My older brother, Richard, did. And didn't care a bit. He was interested in opera and fat novels with small print, and the fact that he could outrun everyone in his class (when forced to do so in gym) brought him some mild pleasure--but not enough to convince him to join the track team. I have to say that it annoyed me--massively--that I (the putative athlete) could not catch my older brother when we were running around.

Life is not fair!

So ... dashes ... not my thing.

Except the ones in writing! It's possible I've posted about this before. Too bad. I'm doing it again.

And the reason? I'm getting ready to publish (via Kindle Direct) the latest collection of "poems" I've written, this particular batch dealing with the years of my life. And as I was going along and reached the years when I was a teacher, I found it more convenient to write about school rather than calendar years.*

So ... I had poems with headings like this one:

1990-1991 School Year

Now ... take a look: That little horizontal mark between the years is a hyphen (all that Blogspot will permit--unless I paste in an alternative). And I should have an alternative there. I should not have a hyphen but an en dash. (So named because it equals in length the width of the letter N.)

There is also an em dash, the kind used, well, here: I liked Snickers bars--a lot. (Blogspot allows only a double-hyphen to serve an an em-dash.)

Okay, what are these things?

Here are the definitions--swiped from Webster:

• hyphen: the punctuation mark used to divide or to compound words or word elements (use with brother-in-law, for example--or to divide words at the end of a line)
• en dash: used to represent a span or range of numbers, dates, or time (like 2003–2004; we were there from 4–5 o'clock) (I had to paste those suckers in.)
• em dash: can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons—in each case to slightly different effect (Examples: I'm sorry I was late—traffic; I saw you at the movies—was that your boyfriend?) (Again--had to paste.)

Okay. In the popular social media (Twitter, Facebook) the only way to include en and em dashes is to paste them in from elsewhere (a pain), but if you're using Word, the program does it automatically for you--if you observe the following:

• to get an en dash: type the word (or number), leave a space, type a hyphen, leave a space, type the next word, type a space--and, voila, an en dash appears (you then need to delete the extra spaces you just made); there's an easier way: in Word, go to Insert-Symbol; find the en dash, select it, then choose a code so you can insert it quickly; I use alt-n; saves time.
• to get an em dash in Word: type a word, type two hyphens (no spaces anywhere yet), type the next word, hit the space bar--an em dash appears! It's like magic! (I set up a code for this, too--alt-d.)

So ... why am I writing about this today? Well, it's harder to make an en dash on the Word version I use on my iPad (which is how I do a lot of writing now), so today I was going through my manuscript (on my computer) and replacing all the hyphens with en dashes.

English-teacher fun (and, yes, that's a hyphen!).**

*You can see them all on my other blog: Daily Doggerel. (Link to it.)

**And Joyce, my teacher, just reminded me (okay, taught me--schooled me?) that there are two other related marks:

• the 2 em dash is used for missing parts of words
• example: You are such a d——ed nuisance!
• the 3 em dash is used for the second instance of an author's name in a works cited list or bibliography
• Dyer, Daniel. I Am Stupid. Hudson:. Stupid Publishing, 2017.
• ———. I Love Snickers. Hudson: Stupid Publishing, 2017.