What kind of dash between years

Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Thanks for covering the proper use of dashes. I hope next week you will cover em dashes which should not have a space on either side. So…I may be the only one wondering this, but how does one distinguish between a hyphen and en dash using the computer keyboard?

I get an em dash by typing two dashes together which get merged by computer software. An easy way to make an en dash is to use the shortcut menu. An en dash is Alt num lock on and the em dash is Alt Hey… I thought it was called an em dash because it represents the width of a capital letter M. The platforms that are used for transcription word-processing are so varied across the industry, with many companies having proprietary platforms, and the I.

There are many characters that do not translate across the wires, from simple, everyday ones like the ampersand and the degree sign to less common ones like French and Spanish accent marks, umlauts and beyond. What happens is that a blank space is left in the final document. Never been able to figure that one out. Two hyphens stay two hyphens, and the only em dash size is the underline. But thank you, Anne. It may give me a clue to figuring it out.

Thanks for the article but please remember people like me next time. Thanks for your note! I also assumed that people might search on this website for posts about en dashes. I should have included a link to one. The professor holds office hours every Wednesday, a.

Correct She served as secretary of state from to Hyphen It was just one of many changes in this post-Obama era. Hyphen They were a bunch of college-educated snobs. Hyphen He submitted his manuscript to a print-only publisher. En dashes are also used to connect a prefix to a proper open compound: for example, pre—World War II.

Now, that is a rather fussy use of the en dash that many people ignore, preferring the hyphen. The em dash has several uses. This explanation is not intended to be exhaustive for much more, see chapter 6 in CMOS , but I do hope that it helps to frame the different potential of each length of dash. Connect Follow on Twitter.