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).

A quick observation this morning as I was brushing up on a couple of grammatical things over at Grammar Girl while finishing a book chapter: Concerning the abbreviations i.e. (that is) and e.g. (for example), most American English dictionaries seem to suggest that they should be followed by a comma, while in British English it is fine to leave the commas out. That said, abbreviations generally makes a text less approachable, so you might want to spell out the words in plain text.