THE MYSTICAL HYPHEN

I enjoy reading other peoples stories, poetry and opinions. That’s why I became a member of Medium.

But I was a language teacher for thirty years. If you’re writing to friends, you just write like you’d speak. Your friends know you. If you’re writing for other people, who don’t know you, you want your message to be clear and understandable. God didn’t create punctuation as a punishment. Other writers and academics created it as a tool to help the writer take his/her message beyond just a clutter of words.

So we have many words that have to be hyphenated and some we think should but shouldn’t. This is not what I want to look at here. The Microsoft corrector can help you or irritate you with “the rules”.

I want to talk about our licence as writers to create new adjectives and verbs and, sometimes, even nouns by combining words. We can use this licence to be uniquely expressive but we must try to write in a way that is clear to the reader. Sometimes the reader is yourself, when you go back over your text, and you don’t quite understand what you wrote two weeks ago.

Some examples:

I had just newly washed my car and the kids threw dirt on it.
The kids threw dirt on my newly-washed car.

This problem crosses into various departments.
This is a cross-departmental problem.

This problem frequently crosses into various departments.
This is a frequent, cross-departmental problem. (here you need a comma and a hyphen)

He tries to convince me with his sweet way of talking.
He tries to sweet-talk me into his way of thinking.
He’s a sweet-talking son-of-a-gun.
I’m not convinced by all his sweet-talk.

The problem, that we all have, is that we think as we write. We also think as we speak but in speech we have pauses and intonations and hand gestures. We don’t have these in what we write so we NEED punctuation to clarify what we are saying. The rules are not the most important element. What’s important is that our reader understands us and wants to continue reading.

The rules say you put a question mark (or is it a question-mark) after a question but why not put it after an affirmation. It makes the writer think. You’re communicating. That’s what you want?
Punctuation is a wonderful set of tools and the hyphen is one of the best links in your chain of thought. No hyphen and the chain is broken.

Sermon over! I’m going for a well-earned cup of freshly-brewed coffee.

Comments welcome.