Rules for using hyphens and dashes

Hyphen and dash are two popular punctuation marks commonly used in sentences and conversations. These two punctuation marks are mostly mistaken and used incorrectly. There are some rules that need to be followed in order to use hyphen and dash correctly. Let’s have a look at the same in this post.

Hyphen: A hyphen is a short line that is used to connect two parts of a word.
For example:
• Pick-me-up after you complete your shopping of kids’ seating furniture .
• The blue-eyed girl was buying some children’s furniture from the shop.

Dash: A dash is longer that hyphen. Dashes are used to signify a break in a thought or a sentence.
For example:
• She came to my place – dressed herself in jeans and then went to buy some kids’ seating furniture  for her child.
• Let her think – she hardly has brains to do so.
Let’s have a look at some of the rules of hyphen:

Hyphen is used to join words to indicate certain meaning by linking the two words. 
For example:
• After buying children’s furniture for my kid, I directly moved towards the race-course.
• Do you have the complete book-case of the author?
Hyphen can be used before nouns to make compound modifiers. 
For example:
• My one-year-old son needs a crib mattress .
• The well-known actor has passed away last year.
Hyphen can be used with prefixes such as ex, all, self etc. to convey certain meaning. 
For example:
• His ex-wife still cares for him.
• She needs to gain some self-confidence to move ahead in her career.
Hyphens are used while writing numbers and fractions. 
For example:
• Mary got married at the age of twenty-two.
• Two-third of her property is given away to charity.
Hyphens are used with suspended compounds. 
For example:
• I bought a crib mattress for my 1-year old son.
• She is fine with both full-time and part-time job.
These are some rules of using hyphens in sentences and conversations.