New Blog Post: How to Use Hyphens and Dashes in Medicine and the Life Sciences
Article Highlights
Hyphens (-), en dashes (–), and em dashes (—) each have many uses that can help make your communication more precise.
Hyphens are most often used in compound modifiers (e.g., small-animal hospital), for prefixes and suffixes (e.g., anti-inflammatory), and between numbers and spelled-out units (e.g., a fifteen-minute timer).
En dashes are used to denote parenthetical content (only in British English; e.g., they spoke – if you could call it that – for three seconds), to show a range (e.g., a total cholesterol value of 125–200 is considered healthy in adults), to indicate a relationship between two nouns (e.g., the water–oil ratio), and in compound adjectives that include an open or hyphenated compound word (e.g., post–World War I).
Em dashes are used to denote parenthetical content (e.g., they spoke—if you could call it that—for three seconds) and can be used in the place of a colon (e.g., the hospital took in many species—cats, dogs, rabbits, horses, cattle, and goats).
Microsoft Word’s find and replace function is a handy tool for correcting errors in hyphen and dash usage. See the table in the full article to learn how to fix these problems more efficiently.
Bonus Content
There is a relatively small, extremely low-stakes (in my opinion, at least) fight going on across the internet right now over em dashes. According to a couple news sources, some are saying that the abundant use of em dashes hints that AI was used in writing the text in question. This is ridiculous—not to mention wishful—thinking. Not only does AI learn from examining human writing, but it’s also fairly well known that many writers love using em dashes, some of them too much.
In writing the last blog post I put out, 12 Tips to Simplify Science Communication, I used ChatGPT to help generate some of the examples (e.g., please write me a run-on sentence about x). One consistent thing I found in these short bits of text it generated was an affinity for three-item lists. This could obviously just be a result of the prompt I used, but I’m going to gently put three-item lists forward as a candidate for “AI identifier” instead; em dashes are innocent!
Remember: every time you comment on or share one of my articles, I come a fraction of an inch closer to leaving the bunker I’ve locked myself in and venturing into the real world!