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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

Complete aside, and I looked in your profile for a way to pm you instead of making this comment where I am sure to burn karma. I noticed in two separate comments that you are improperly using hyphens.

> ... no interest-like people the world ...

Hyphens join two words. This sentence was hard to parse and was nonsensical until I realized the hyphen was intended as a separator. Consider spaces around hyphens when joining parts of a sentence. I was stuck for a spell wondering what an "interest-like" person was - was it a person with a return on value?

Cheers.

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Thank you for the info I’m aware that the hyphen used that way is a personal quirk. But I’m always looking to improve my written communication so I’ll use them correctly going forward.

I believe the punctuation you intended was the em-dash—so called because it is the width of an "m" in typical typography—which acts as a kind of weaker replacement for semicolon or parentheses. You can type it with option+[-] on an Apple device. If you can't or don't know how to type the character on the device you're using, a pair of hyphens are conventionally understood to represent the em-dash, as "--". No spaces are required on either side of this mark in any case, though if you choose to use a single hyphen to represent it then including spaces would certainly be better (clearer) than not including them.

FWIW sometimes I'll do an emdash -- which allows a conceptual aside -- by using two hyphens, but always with spacing so as not to confuse the usage with word-joining.

When an em dash is used to indicate a pause, it's most often used without spacing between words and the em dash—except in newspapers [1].

[1] http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html

Yes, my usage would normally be with endash in traditional media AFAIAA. Punctuation, like grammar, serves the user in my mode of writing.

Agree with the comment. That sentence made no sense whatsoever. Had to re read 10 times to figure out that the hyphen was probably wrong. Then still not sure whether it was a failed copy/paste or multiple words missing.

If you have troubles with using hyphens, I'd recommend to not use any, ever. There are barely any English word requiring one and noone will care if it's missing.

Personally -- due to laziness -- I just do this when typing plaintext.

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