I have been doing quite a lot of manuscript editing recently and realize that many people—including academics—don’t understand the differences between the symbols hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash. So here is a quick explanation: hyphen (-): is used to join words (“music-related”). You type this character with the Minus key on the keyboard, so it is the easiest one to use. en-dash (–): is used to explain relationships between two concepts (“action–couplings”) or in number series (0–100).

Earlier today I was asked about what tools I use when writing. This is not something I have written about here on the blog before, although I do have very strong opinions on my own tools. I actually really enjoy reading about how other people work, so writing about it here may perhaps also be interesting to others. Text editor: Atom Most of my writing, whether it is e-mail drafts, meeting notes, or academic papers, is done in the form of plain text files.

I used to use Journler for taking notes on my computer, and when Journler died I moved on to MacJournal. However, nowadays I constantly find myself using different computers (Mac, Windows, Linux) and various mobile devices (iOS and Android) every day, and have found it to be problematic to be locked into an OSX/iOS application for note taking/access. There are some cross-platform note-taking applications out there, most notably Evernote, which I have tried to become friends with several times, without success.