I was especially irked this weekend. A club came out to the wrestling tournament I reffed, and they had team t-shirts with their logo (a shamrock) on the front. On the back, it said “If Your Lucky Enough To Be Irish, Your Lucky Enough.”
Well, I know I’m lucky, but it’s not like the kids made these shirts! The coaches - all adults who should know better - ordered them!
Okay everyone makes spelling and grammatical errors from time to time but surely it’s common sense to realise the difference between “your” and “you are” (you’re). Hell, if everyone just spelt and constructed sentences however they wanted, what a shambles it would be.
(I know, I know I’m sure I have some sort of error in there, please enlighten me).
Since I noticed the same error appearing in several posts of the folks in this thread who are passionate on the topic of grammar, I thought you’d appreciate knowing the following.
When you use a dash to separate two independent clauses that are related or to insert a thought in the midst of a sentence, the punctuation you should use is not the hyphen, it’s the longer, thinner em-dash.
You can get one on a Mac by typing shift-option-hyphen. Apparently on a PC you get one by typing ctrl-alt-minus (the hyphen on the numeric keypad) or Alt-0151 (also on the numeric pad) but I can’t confirm that. You also may be able to use the Insert Symbol function, depending on your platform and application. If you don’t know the trick for your computer or are using a typewriter, the convention is to use two hyphens to represent an em-dash.
You should not put spaces on either side of an em-dash.
Example: If you want to be more typographically correct than your fellow posters—and more attractive to the opposite sex—learn to use em-dashes properly.
In case anyone wishes to read further about oft-confused en-dashes, em-dashes, hyphens, and minus signs (which are all, in proper typesetting, different lengths) try googling on any or all of those terms.