#amwriting: Hyphens are the Devil

I don’t live in hyphen hell, more like a zone where hyphens nip the skin like mini-mosquitoes. Or is it mini mosquitoes. Grammerly and spellcheck get it wrong sometimes. Connie Jasperson shares her guidelines for hyphenation.

They’ll help a little, until you lose the link to the blog. But that’s just me being neg…proactive. I’m bookmarking this now.

I’ll forget where I bookmarked it, but you’ll do a better job. I’m sure.

PS: I’m not still paying my student loans at 62 to pay for college to learn this. I paid for college to expand my horizons and stretch my brain. But I did learn this at college.

Life in the Realm of Fantasy

As it is March and is that month known as National Novel Editing Month, or NaNoEdMo, I will be be revisiting some of my posts on the craft of writing. Today we are looking at that most abused morsel of punctuation, the Hyphen. In my own work I will be looking at each hyphen and deciding if it stays or if it goes. Much of the time, they must go. 

Most authors know that a compound word is a combination of two or more words that function as a single unit of meaning. Most of us even know that there are two types of compounds: those written as single words, with no hyphenation and which are called “closed compounds”– such as the word “bedspread,”  AND  the “hyphenated compounds,” such as “jack-in-the-box” and “self-worth.”

But there is a third group, and they are the bane of my life–those mysterious…

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