Hyphens and dashes | Typography for Lawyers

hyphens and dashes

Use them, don’t confuse them

Hyphens and dashes look similar, but they’re not interchangeable.

		Windows	Mac OS	HTML
-	hyphen	-	-	-
–	en dash	alt 0150	option + hyphen	`–`
—	em dash	alt 0151	option + shift + hyphen	`—`

The hyphen (-) is the smallest of these marks. It has three uses.

A hyphen appears at the end of a line when a word breaks onto the next line. These hyphens are added and removed automatically by your word processor’s hyphenation feature.
Some multipart words are spelled with a hyphen (topsy-turvy, cost-effective, bric-a-brac). But a prefix is not typically followed with a hyphen (nonprofit, not non-profit).
No hyphen is necessary in phrasal adjectives that begin with an adverb ending in ‑ly (it’s a closely held company, not a closely-held company). Nor is a hyphen necessary in multipart foreign terms or proper names used as adjectives (habeas corpus appeal on the Third Circuit docket, not habeas-corpus appeal on the Third-Circuit docket).
A hyphen is used in phrasal adjectives (commercial-speech restriction, estate-planning attorney, law-school grades) to ensure clarity. Nonprofessional writers often omit these hyphens. As a professional writer, you should not.
For instance, consider the unhyphenated phrase five dollar bills. Is five the quantity of dollar bills, or are the bills each worth five dollars? As written, it suggests the former. If you mean the latter, then you’d write five-dollar bills.

Dashes come in two sizes—the en dash and the em dash. The em dash (—) is typically about as wide as a capital H. The en dash (–) is about half as wide.

En and em dashes are often approximated by typing two or three hyphens in a row (-- or --- ). Don’t do that. Use real dashes.

The en dash has two uses.

It indicates a range of values (1880–1912, 116 Cal. App. 4th 330–39, Exhibits A–E). If you open with from, pair it with to instead of an en dash (from 1880 to 1912, not from 1880–1912).
It denotes a connection or contrast between pairs of words (conservative–liberal split, Arizona–Nevada reciprocity, Sarbanes–Oxley Act).

The em dash is used to make a break between parts of a sentence. Use it when a comma is too weak, but a colon, semicolon, or pair of parentheses is too strong. The em dash puts a nice pause in the text—and it is underused in professional writing.

by the way

Don’t use a slash ( / ) where an en dash is correct.
Even though the en dash is used for joint authors (Sarbanes–Oxley Act), use a hyphen for compound names. If the son and daughter of Sarbanes and Oxley married, they’d be known as Mr. & Mrs. Sarbanes-Oxley (with a hyphen), not Mr. & Mrs. Sarbanes–Oxley (with an en dash).
Em and en dashes are typically set flush against the surrounding text. But if your em dashes look like they’re being squeezed, it’s fine to add word spaces before and after.
the em on a piece of metal type
Em and en refer to units of typographic measurement, not to the letters M and N. (Yes, the homophony is confusing. To disambiguate, loud print shops referred to them as mutton and nut.) In a traditional metal font, the em was the vertical distance from the top of a piece of type to the bottom. The en was half the size of the em. Originally, the width of the em and en dashes corresponded to these units. In today’s digital fonts, they run narrower.