Grammar

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 motion”). 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–sound couplings”) or in number series (0–100). I haven’t found a way to type this on Ubuntu, but on Windows, you can use the Alt key and press the ASCII code 0150. On Mac, you get it by pressing the Option key together with the Minus key. In Markdown and HTML code, it can be written with the command –. In LaTeX, it is written --. em-dash (—): is used to break up a sentence—like this one—and can be used instead of commas (,). On Ubuntu, it can be typed with the Alt gr key together with the Minus key. On Windows, you can use the Alt key and press the ASCII code 0151. Mac is the most logical, using the Option and Shift keys together with Minus. In Markdown and HTML code, it can be written as —. In LaTeX, it is written ---. Looking around, I see that it is actually even more complex than this. On a How-To Geek page I learned that the minus sign used in mathematics (−7) is not a hyphen but has its own ASCII code and HTML representation: −. I also learned that from a typographical perspective, there are also “non-breaking hyphens” (‑), “figure dash” (‒), and “horizontal bar” (―). ...

Quotation marks are used for different things in texts. Sometimes they are used to mark actual quotations, things that people have said and written. Other times they are used to mark a word, such as this is “funny”. Some people also use them to Single vs double quotes There is not a right or wrong when it comes to using single (’) or double (") quotes. Different style guides say different things, so use whatever is suggested. In any case, the most important is being consistent. ...

I see that many students (and even peers) confuse the two terms “duration” and “length”. This blog post is placeholder to explain that duration is the length of time. I don’t want to write any wrong examples here on my blog, but here are two correct ones: The duration of the audio recording is 14 seconds. The length of the wand is 23 centimeters. Nothing wrong will happen if using them differently, but it is even better to be precise.

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.