Latent Print presents Styleguide Wednesday, a post each Wednesday featuring an editorial convention from the world of styleguides. View previous Latent Print moments of stylebook study and reflection here. This week features en dash punctuation of compound modifiers.
Styleguide Wednesday is as much for readers as it is for copyeditors, proofreaders, designers, and publishers. Each party benefits from an illustration of the conventions of print.
The en dash, in the following examples, joins open compounds to form the single-thought modifier: the Tony Award–winning director or grandmother's post–World War II stories. From the examples we see that a hyphen would be insufficient.
Readers should know not to be puzzled when the en dash appears to function as a hyphen. Editors should know when to use it and when not to trouble their designers; designers and publishers should engage when editors insist there's a difference between a hyphen and an en dash besides length.
For more on the en dash as hyphen check out Amy Einsohn's The Copyeditor's Handbook, p. 108; Chicago 6.85; or The Gregg Reference Manual 424 and 819.
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While the examples in the post show an en dash can behave as a hyphen, the use of a hyphen in such cases, though conventional in some aspects, is illogical and could lead to misreading. Read closely Tony Award-winning director. The hyphen usage creates an ambiguity: Is it Tony the director who's won an award, award erroneously capitalized and a comma missing? Corrected, this interpretation reads Tony, award-winning director.
What the en dash does for us then is shows that Tony Award is a unit, can remain capitalized, and that its connection to winning describes the director completely.
The hyphen could stand-in on the basis that it is a single keystroke and won't get lost in file transmissions (plus I can't code for en dash in blogger comments). But, en dash for clarity.
It's like learning another letter to the alphabet.
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