Premise

To be honest, most people don’t know (or even care much) about the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. It seems relatively irrelevant when you’re running around trying to get to work on-time, prepare for a date, or are out for the night with friends.

So if that’s the case for most people, then why bother learning about different types of dashes in writing and communication. What’s the point?

Well, let’s simply list some of the potential advantages:

• You look smart—and fancy. People who can use diverse forms of punctuation can indeed seem savvy!
• You can actually regulate what you say and identify/highlight different ideas with more emphasis.
• Makes you think about how you use language and how typography helps to visually organize different orderings of detail.
• Knowing the differences avoids any potential confusions between them (e.g., like if you’re miss-using hyphens vs. em dashes).

Examples

Of course, seeing is believing. So let’s look at a breakdown of how each of these can be used with some clarifying purpose in mind.

Hyphens (-)

Let’s keep things basic. Hyphens are the shortest dashes—and the most common. It’s likely on near the top of your keyboard somewhere. It’s essential function is to create compound words. You’ve probably seen this a million times, and even used some yourself. They can be used as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Just take a look at some such examples:

• Hyphenated noun: “mother-in-law”
• Hyphenated verb: “run-in”
• Hyphenated adjective: “mind-blowing”

Simply put: you can hyphenate two words, to create something with a much more specific meaning in mind!

En Dashes

These are probably the least known/implemented form of dashing. They basically do a lot of the dirty work that hyphens and em dashes aren’t willing to. Just take a quick look at this diverse list of duties:

• Connecting numbers/ranges: 2009–2012 or 10%–20%
• Times: Meet us sometime between 12–1 p.m.
• Connecting places: The JFK–SFO flight was delayed
• Comparisons: The East–West rivalry was a feisty one!
• Combining two already hyphenated compounds: Their relationship was a multi-year–love-hate affair.
• Proper nouns that would otherwise be compounded: The Sampson Award–winning performer declined to appear in person.
• Prefixes before open compounds: The pre–Regan Era had a much different tone.

There are further examples, of course, but these, again, are some of the more common instances you’ll come across in your dashing journeys.

Em Dashes

Em dashes have seemingly increased in usage over the years—and for good reason. They’re a great way to emphasize additional information at the end of sentences—or within sentences—like we just did. You might be wondering, “Well how the heck then do I know when to use em dashes rather than, say, parentheses to add information onto or within sentences?” Don’t worry, we have a whole breakdown of that exact consideration that you can check out by clicking here!

But back to our dashing friend, the em dash. Here, you’re basically doing what we mentioned above. Here’s a couple more quick examples:

She was the greatest executive in the history of the company—a company which had seen many great executives.

The committee—the majority of whom had voted against the bill—usurpingly refused to hear any further petitions on the matter.

Further Considerations

Does any of this really matter? In many cases, yes. But while it’s unlikely to impact your daily life, knowing the difference can avoid confusion and make your communication (and how you think about it) much more consistent, clear and compelling.

Keep in mind that for variations with these dashes, you should remain consistent in however you implement them. Sometimes, students will point out that certain word processors auto-format dashes—or fail to. In these cases, it’s worth knowing the conventions so that you can at least remain consistent (and therefore clear) for both your audiences, as well as yourself as you review your own work. For example, a ton of student papers look like this:

The doctors who conducted the research- many of whom were already well-known-didn’t know the difference.

You can obviously see how this example above could lead to confusion. Which words here are supposed to be hyphenated and or dashed? We might be able to puzzle it out reading it ourselves, but now we’re distracted from what your point and emphasis is supposed to be. This would make things a lot more clear:

The doctors who conducted the research – – many of whom were already well-known – – didn’t know the difference.

As you can see, in this hypothetical example, our word processor didn’t auto-format our hyphens into em dashes, so we just made them kinda look like some. But they’re clear, consistent, and distinct from the hyphen being clearly used to make the compound word “well-known.” So as long as you’re consistent in this way, you should be good to go!