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It ought to be no surprise that I, a self-admitted grammar nerd, correct people’s verbal slip-ups — incorrect prepositions, past participles and the like. What really gets me, though, is when there is a mistake that I cannot address right away, often because it is written. After all, to whom do I lament an error in this syllabus, on that flier or — most frustratingly — in that Facebook status? But I digress. If I cannot confront the culprit himself, I might as well confront the problem here. That being said, let’s talk about dashes, or, if you prefer, let’s talk about hyphens. We might as well talk about both, because nowadays it seems that people have forgotten the difference. It is more than a matter of length, people.

A hyphen is generally used to combine words or parts of words. A common situation is when a word has a hyphenated prefix preceding it. For instance, one can co-sponsor an event or love post-World War I literature or consider a matter non-negotiable. Hyphens can also combine words to create hyphenated adjectives. Relevant examples include the all-powerful copy editors and the heart-wrenching pain they feel when they see grammar bastardized. Some even describe a you-should-crawl-under-a-rock-and-die feeling. There are other uses, of course, but the point is that hyphens often combine words and their elements to modify meaning. (Some cheeky folk will want to say here that a hyphen can be used as a bullet point or a minus sign. Suit yourself.)

A hyphen cannot, however, take the place of an em dash, which for the purposes of this post will be referred to henceforth simply as a dash. Dashes are used to denote parenthetical phrases and interjections.  The dash in my opening sentence marks an interjection — that is, I interrupted a previous thought to clarify another, as I am doing now. Sentences with certain parenthetical phrases — long lists or appositives, to name a couple — can also feature dashes. People seem to understand this, but they commonly make the mistake of using a hyphen in place of a dash. Your hyphen is not a proper em dash just because Microsoft Word automatically lengthened it for you. Similarly, two consecutive hyphens are two consecutive hyphens and not a dash.

Some may think that I am being uptight, that little differences like this rarely have a significant effect on meaning. I present them with the following sentence, which I came across in a syllabus for one of my classes: “No class-work on midterm.”

What? What does this mean? Does it mean that there is no classwork on the day of my midterm? That there is no class, and I ought to work on my midterm? This professor either used a hyphen incorrectly — “classwork” is not hyphenated — or she meant for it to be a dash. In the end, it turned out to be the latter, but how was I supposed to know that? It is the sign of a sad world when even our instructors cannot punctuate correctly.

In short, I say that this little difference does matter. It matters for reasons of clarity and accuracy. It matters to people who have more important things to do than decipher based on this silly, erroneous sentence whether to run to class or rush to study.

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