Comment

Comment by Zetta Brown on August 31, 2012 at 1:02am

You nailed it, Maria! Another thing is when people confuse the em-dash with the en-dash. That used to be one of my pitfalls.

Comment by Deepa Agarwal on August 30, 2012 at 9:52pm

Thanks Maria for illustrating the use of hyphens with those excellent examples. Hyphens and apostrophes are important in order to make the meaning clear in text. Readers may not always notice the errors but are likely to experience some confusion about the meaning. I feel that in writing poetry you can take a lot of liberty with the rules of grammar but in prose you need to be a little cautious. In the end it's the rhythm of your writing that is most important and that should capture the reader's ear.

Comment by Amyah L on August 30, 2012 at 11:22am

Hello Maria and everybody! I use the hyphen a lot to isolate thoughts but I hate to hyphenate a word... and I love apostrophes also, like Sheryl :)  All those signs are important as they put order in a text, I think. It separates, classify the thoughts, indicate precisely to the reader what you are thinking and what you want to say, give a time to breath, a space to think, a way to follow the story, to express our writer's voice. I can understand changes in some rules like the one space instead of two after the period when you are starting a new sentence -- at the end of a long manuscripts you save sometimes pages but, for the rest of it, it is part of the freedom of expression and the explosion of creativity. Still, we have to be logic but... instead of searching for the black spot or the error, why not just read and enter the flow of the story!

Comment by Joanne R. Alloway on August 30, 2012 at 11:05am

I completely agree and often go back when editing and add hyphens. Good examples, Maria!

Comment by Sheryl Sorrentino on August 28, 2012 at 7:28pm

 

Another thing that drives me bonkers is the seeming trend against using apostrophes.