ID: A Black woman wearing a black shirt squeezes her eyes shut and presses her hands to her temples. Thought bubbles cluttered with punctuation marks come from her head.
During the quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I binge-watched a rom-com series called Dash & Lily on Netflix. Based on the young adult novel Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, it’s the story of two teenagers in New York City who “meet” via a red notebook strategically placed around the city. They get acquainted by writing clues in the notebook, but they don’t include their names. Dash’s name is unique and might reveal his identity, so he only provides a clue—his name is “a connector of words,” which Lily thinks is cute and intriguing.
My English teacher brain proceeded to overthink that one. It’s actually a hyphen that often connects compound words:
“We need to find a cat-friendly hotel.”
“I signed up for a half-hour cooking lesson.”
“I like spending time with my book-loving friends.”
But I suppose a main character named Hyphen wouldn’t have been so cute.
(Fortunately, I halted these ruminations long enough to enjoy the rest of episode three of the series, which featured an exceptional scene in which Lily, wearing her fabulous red boots, goes to an underground club on her own and dances to a Jewish punk band called Challah Back Boys.)
I hate to be a spoilsport, but there’s more to the hyphen and dash than connections. In fact, while a hyphen is a “connector of words,” dashes are typically used to set off words and phrases. Merriam-Webster states that a dash is a “punctuation mark that is used especially to indicate a break in the thought or structure of a sentence.” We writers and editors know that hyphens and dashes can be tormentors. In fact, we often curse them. When do we use them? When do we leave them out? Why do we have to keep looking them up?
To help you sort out this pecky punctuation problem, here are some examples of the hyphen and dash compliments of Dash, one of the main characters in Cohn and Levithan’s novel, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares.
The hyphen is a joiner of words, as you can see when Dash discusses his parents’ holiday plans: “This year I had managed to become a voluntary orphan for Christmas, telling my mother that I was spending it with my father, and my father that I was spending it with my mother, so that each of them booked nonrefundable vacations with their post-divorce paramours.” The words post and divorce work together as one word to modify the word paramours, so the hyphen is needed as a connector.
For Dash, the Strand bookstore is a necessary respite from the holidays. “Some bookstores want you to believe they’re a community center, like they need to host a cookie-making class in order to sell you some Proust. But the Strand leaves you completely on your own, caught between the warring forces of organization and idiosyncrasy, with idiosyncrasy winning every time.” Like the previous example, the words cookie and making work together as one word to modify the word class, so the hyphen connects them. Also, omitting the hyphen could cause the reader to stumble through the sentence a bit, even if only for a split second. They need to host a cookie? Oh, it’s a cookie-making class.
Cohn and Levithan also often use the em dash in Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares. This punctuation mark is the overachiever in the family—it’s versatile, though sometimes it shows up too often and does too much. When used subtly, it serves as an effective substitute for colons, semicolons, commas, and parentheses. Here, Dash describes his feelings about Christmas:
“It was Christmastime in New York City, the most detestable time of the year. The moo-like crowds, the endless visits from hapless relatives, the ersatz cheer, the joyless attempts at joyfulness—my natural aversion to human contact could only intensify in this context.” The em dash works like a colon here, indicating that what follows the em dash will explain what came before it. Technically, a colon after joyfulness would be incorrect anyway, as a colon should be preceded by a complete sentence.
The Strand is the foundation of this storyline, the place where the red journal first makes its appearance and initially bonds these characters. Dash loves the Strand. In this passage, note the hyphens working as connectors and an em dash politely standing in for a comma:
“I was popping back and forth between [my parents’] apartments while they were away—but mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition, not so much bookstore as the collision of a hundred different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over eighteen miles of shelves. All the clerks there saunter-slouch around distractedly in their thrift-store button-downs, like older siblings who will never, ever be bothered to talk to you or care about you or even acknowledge your existence if their friends are around …”
And here’s a confession: I had to look up some of the compound words I used in this article to confirm whether they are hyphenated or not: binge-watched, rom-com, spoilsport, split second, and pop-up. Even the pros don’t have them memorized. Merriam-Webster reassured me I’m on the right track.
ID: Amy, a White woman with dark hair and glasses smiles at the camera. She wears a magenta sweater and has a streak of silver running through her hair.
Amy Cecil Holm is Allegory Editing’s resident Line Editor, Copy Editor, and Proofreader. She draws upon decades of teaching college English to help authors polish their prose. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in creative writing and has worked as a journalist, technical writer, and educator. Amy has taught courses in English composition, literature, creative writing, journalistic writing, business writing, and developmental reading, among others. She has a keen understanding of grammar, punctuation, and diction and uses her careful attention to detail to help prepare manuscripts for submission and publication.
