Punctuation in Computerland

Factual Questions
1

For a while now I’ve been slightly puzzled by a bit of punctuation I keep seeing, mainly on websites originating in the USA and indeed on this very Board.

It consists of two hyphens typed in between words without any spaces - as described here, an on-line writing guide produced by something called Purdue University, which I understand is in the state of Indiana but of whose authority on the subject I know nothing. Apparently it is meant to represent a dash (whether an en dash or an em dash it doesn’t say).

I was taught - admittedly back in the early 60s - that there should be spaces before and after a dash, as I have just typed using the hyphen key, which looks perfectly OK to me. And if I need to type an em dash, I am sure Mr Gates has provided me with a means of doing so.

Can anyone enlighten me as to how this “new” punctuation mark came about or from where it may have come? Or should I just get my coat and slope off, muttering to myself about things not being the same as when I were a lad?

2

It’s not new. Back in the typewriter days of the 60s, you could either create a dash with spaces – this way – or without–that way. Both were considered correct as long as you were consistent. Which you were taught depended on your typing teacher.

3

Dashes

Parenthetical ashes are used to set off parenthetical statements – such as this one right here – and come in two styles. I use the British – an en-dash surrounded by spaces – myself, since (especially when rendering dashes with multiple hyphens as in ASCII) the American style—an em-dash with no spaces—just looks funny to me.

4

How about ALT 0151 — for the ‘em’ dash?
Ths is probably the character that ‘Mr Gates has provided’ to which seosamh referred.

5

Nice for those running Windows. Mac users can use option+shift±. The thing is, that’s not ASCII, it’s Unicode. Many people still use plain 8-bit (or even 7-bit) ASCII text for many things and would just get a question mark for that, like this board gets when I use Unicode greek characters.

6

It’s a surrogate em-dash, for primitive typing environments, and the occasional primitive typist.

That Purdue site is an “on-line writing guide”, and proper em-dashes aren’t (or at least for many years weren’t) available on every computer system. The guide is also addressing typewriter users, and em-dashes aren’t very common on those machines either. (Most typewriters are mono-spaced after all.) Perhaps this particular writing guide, because it’s for university students with many different writing tools, is trying to accommodate the lowest common denominator. Note that it was first written in 1995, and maybe hasn’t been updated much.

Incidentally, I wouldn’t consider Purdue much of an authority on writing styles. They do have an excellent engineering school however. And so there’s another possible explanation for you: the guide is addressed to engineering students, who generally speaking take no interest in the nuances of typography.

But most of Earth’s peoples, even here in the U.S., have never heard of the Purdue Writing Lab and its friendly, earnest advice on how we should write. So most usage of the double-hyphen that you see today is either (A) a relic from the Dark Age when genuine em-dashes were scarce, or (B) the output of lazy typists who don’t know or don’t care how to produce the right character.

In American style guides they often tell you not to put any spaces before and after an em-dash. I don’t know why; personally I don’t like the look.

Are you in the U.K.? If the British do use spaces before and after the dash, well then there’s one convention anyway that we shouldn’t have tossed into Boston harbor. (You can keep all those extra letter u’s however.)

7

But that’s not a dash, it’s a hyphen – in the ISO Latin character set used by most computers in the West, semantically equivalent to a minus. But hyphens aren’t dashes! (See the similarly-titled section in that article; it’s nominally about HTML, but contains some good stuff about typography in general.)

Historically, the computing world has been restricted by the characters available for display; ASCII, for example, which ruled for many years, doesn’t even have any dash characters, nor important diacritical marks such as in the grave (“é”) or umlaut (“ä”), nor international letters such as “å” and “ø”.

People have got by with simple kludges – `` (a pair of grave accents) to emulate quotation marks, for example, and of course the double hyphen notation ("–") that has long been used to emulate en/em dashes.

ISO Latin was one of the many extensions invented to supply such characters; the en dash (–) and the em dash (—) are both supported. Most American and European web sites use one of the ISO Latin character sets. In more recent times, the Unicode consortium have formalized a character set that includes the several dash characters, but it will be a few years until the world is fully Unicode-enabled.

As long as you’re in the Windows world and deal with things like Office documents, the dashes are available to you, and you should use them. Indeed, Office will, out of the box, automatically turn hyphens and double hyphens into the appropriate dashes as you type.

Still, keyboards haven’t really caught up with the typographical advances; note, for example, the lack of directional quotation marks (“hello”). There are programs out there that would let you map the dashes to keys on your keyboard, if you want.

8

There’s some punctuation gurus who don’t want you to space after a comma or period on webpages.

Well, I’ve paid for the spacebar. And I’m going to use it.

9

The British also use an en-dash (ASCII-denoted by a doubled hyphen) with spaces while American guides (except a few now advising the British style) use an em-dash (ASCII-denoted by a tripled hyphen) with no spaces.

10

To me, spaces before em dashes breaks up the sentence too much. I’ve always been taught in design classes not to never introduce a full space behind and ahead of an em dash. You can air it out a bit by tweaking the kerning a tad, but never so much as putting a full space. To me, it looks plain ugly.

To wit:

Em dashes—I never space them.
Em dashes — I never space them.

Psychologically, for me, the first sentence connects the first two thoughts better than the second. The second is a little bit too disjointed. Doesn’t look right to my eyes. Neither does the space+en dash. For me, en-dashes are reserved for indicating ranges, as in “New Accounts: January–April, 2004.” Also, no spaces. An en-dash can also be used for compounds consisting of hyphenated words: “a post-Baroque–pre-Romantic composition.” (OK, nobody would use that particular phrase, but I couldn’t come up with anything.

11

Thanks for the contributions.

To clear something up: yes, I am in the UK and this is where I learnt my punctuation (ffrom a Nazi nun called Sr Maria Rosarii). As far as I am aware we always put spaces before and, where appropriate, after our en dashes. Em dashes you don’t see all that often, although they are extensively used in Acts of Parliament, for example my old mate the Railways Act 1993.

As for any difference between hyphens and en dashes, I am afraid I never use a micrometer when I am reading anything…

On another tack, while I worked at the Trade Mark Registry in Newport in about 1993, the Trade Mark Journal was computerised and for some bizarre reason they could never manage to produce opening quotation marks, which appeared all over the place (e.g. in disclaimers), so they used to use all closing ones which looked absolutely crap. I tried to badger them to change but to no avail. I wonder if they’ve fixed it yet?

12

[HIJACK] Don’t know about anybody else, but I took typing classes in the 6th Grade in 1985 on an old Canon electric typewriter and I put TWO spaces after periods and colons. From what I understand, that has been reduced to one space in modern typing classes [/HIJACK]

13

Like I said, the British style is a spaced en-dash. As for kerning, I can (and do) use a thinspace on TeX, but until the SDMB introduces TeX posting…

14

I think that’s another artifact of fixed-width typing styles like typewriters and ASCII. My mother taught me the same thing, but “proper” typesetting uses a different formula than just two single spaces (read some of Knuth’s stuff about developing TeX). In many computer applications today, this is done automatically, whether you use a single or a double space.

15

In HTML, you can put as many spaces as you want and it’ll only show one unless you use the   HTML tag. I find it easier to read with two spaces, especially when trying to speed read and find the ends of sentences fast. In the edit box, I can see that you use two spaces, but on the board, it only appears as one.

16

What Mathochist said is correct.

In proportionally spaced fonts only one space is required after punctuation. In monospaced fonts (fonts in which all the letters take up the same amount of space—Courier and American Typewriter are pretty common ones), you should put two spaces after periods. No professionally typeset book has extra spaces after periods or colons. Once again, putting two spaces between sentences tends to make the writing appear choppy and fragmented. It drives me nuts when I come across text that does this.

17

I’ve never seen three hyphens used for an em-dash. I believe the convention is to use two hyphens for an em-dash, and one hyphen for an en-dash, even though a true en-dash is slightly longer.

An en-dash is rarely used, and never for parenthetical comments. I believe it is properly used between two numerals to describe a range, as in “open 8-5” or “read pp. 179-215.”

In the US no spaces sorround an em-dash. In the UK, they do.

18

With the caveat that what you see after a period behaves differently from what you see between words and after a comma, mostly due to subtle points about kerning, IIRC.

19

Are you sure? I have worked three or four British publications (newspapers and magazines) and have always used em dashes, with spaces:

“We use em dashes — with a space before and after each — to set off parenthetical parts of a sentence.”

At one magazine I worked for, we used en dashes for two things: as a separator when specifying a range of figures, dates etc (“1939–45”); and to link, say names of authors of a paper or theorem (“the Shimura–Taniyama Conjecture”). Fowler agrees with this usage, but most newspapers use hyphens for these occasions.

Em dashes seem to be pretty much universally used for parenthesis among British newspapers, as far as I can see.

20

Actually, it looks like the SDMB is replacing my en dashes with hyphens:

En dash (Alt+0150) –
Hyphen -

Those look different when I compose the message, but not when I post. The em dashes come out OK though. Odd.