Know your dashes: the hyphen, en dash and em dash

Know your dashes, em dash, en dash and hyphen and when to use each with examples

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OK, so you can get a little over the top about these, but I do notice when a hyphen is used to add a thought in text rather than the em dash, which is better made for it—and it's much nicer than using brackets or parentheses ().

And—to go the full mile—why not use an en dash when you’re separating your page numbers 1–5, or months May–Sep, next time?

Didn’t spot the difference?

- hypen · short

– en dash · medium

— em dash · long

Most writing tools and Windows and Mac have tricks to do these automatically for you.

Published 9 Mar 2016

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Chihuahua syndrome refers to messy data from variations in spelling or input—Chihuahua is easy to misspell. The quality of your data matters—errors can creep in anywhere, particularly when people enter data. Garbage in, garbage out. Here's Chris Groskopf quoted in Seeing with Fresh Eyes—Meaning, Space, Data, Truth by Edward Tufte: "There is no worse way to screw up data than to let a single human type it in, without validation. I acquired a complete dog licensing database. Instead of requiring people registering their dog to choose a breed from a list, the system gave dog owners a text field to type into, so this database had 250 spellings of Chihuahua. Even the best tools can't save messy data. Beware of human-entered data." —Chris Groskopf Capitals, spaces, misspellings, hyphens, numbers stored as text, numbers entered as letters (I, O), accents, straight/curly apostrophes, dates out of order, languages, dialects, abbreviations, and more are all routes for misleading your analysis. Spend time with your data. The name The chihuahua syndrome is from Edward Tufte. Adding these terms below to help anyone searching for the sketch ;o) che hua hua, che-hua-hua, che-wara, chee-hua-hua, cheehuahua, chehuahua, chehaha, chehawa, chewawa, chihaha, chihuahua, chihuawa, chiwawa, chiehuaua...…Chihuahua syndrome refers to messy data from variations in spelling or input—Chihuahua is easy to misspell. The quality of your data matters—errors can creep in anywhere, particularly when people enter data. Garbage in, garbage out. Here's Chris Groskopf quoted in Seeing with Fresh Eyes—Meaning, Space, Data, Truth by Edward Tufte: "There is no worse way to screw up data than to let a single human type it in, without validation. I acquired a complete dog licensing database. Instead of requiring people registering their dog to choose a breed from a list, the system gave dog owners a text field to type into, so this database had 250 spellings of Chihuahua. Even the best tools can't save messy data. Beware of human-entered data." —Chris Groskopf Capitals, spaces, misspellings, hyphens, numbers stored as text, numbers entered as letters (I, O), accents, straight/curly apostrophes, dates out of order, languages, dialects, abbreviations, and more are all routes for misleading your analysis. Spend time with your data. The name The chihuahua syndrome is from Edward Tufte. Adding these terms below to help anyone searching for the sketch ;o) che hua hua, che-hua-hua, che-wara, chee-hua-hua, cheehuahua, chehuahua, chehaha, chehawa, chewawa, chihaha, chihuahua, chihuawa, chiwawa, chiehuaua...

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