Hyphen, En Dash, Em Dash: Three Marks, Three Jobs
They look similar and do entirely different things. Two of them most people have never deliberately typed.
Author
Nathan Cole writes the adjective guides and word lists on Grammar Simplified. Every guide he publishes is checked against Merriam-Webster for spelling and usage, the Chicago Manual of Style for punctuation, and the AP Stylebook where a convention is specific to web writing. Where a rule is genuinely disputed among those authorities, he says so in the guide rather than picking a side quietly. Corrections are welcome and get acted on — see the editorial policy.
900 guides published
They look similar and do entirely different things. Two of them most people have never deliberately typed.
Two uses, both simple. The reason people avoid it is that nobody explains which one they are looking at.
It is a Latin plural, English has stopped treating it as one, and the only genuinely wrong answer is changing your mind halfway through a document.
There is a rule, it takes ten seconds to apply, and there are three situations where following it will make you sound worse.
Chaucer used it. Shakespeare used it. The objection arrived in the eighteenth century, and the alternatives have all failed.
Nice meant foolish. Awful meant awe-inspiring. Decimate meant to kill one in ten. Some of these reversals are finished and some are happening now.
Dickens did it. So did Joyce, Twain and Fitzgerald. The complaint is younger than the usage it complains about.
It is in the dictionary. That does not settle the argument, and understanding why is more useful than knowing which side you are on.
“I didn’t see nothing” is not bad mathematics. It is a grammatical feature of many English dialects, and once it was standard everywhere.
Roughly one sentence in ten in published English begins with a conjunction. The prohibition was a teaching shortcut that outlived its purpose.
Grammar Simplified
Plain-English grammar guides and curated adjective lists. Free to read, checked against Merriam-Webster, Chicago and AP before publication.
194 grammar guides →