I have always struggled with certain forms of punctuation, however, I now find myself becoming obsessive about it. Hyphens have been a particularly tricky concept for me to grasp. I used to find myself hyphenating everything because I was really confused. Now, due to the University of Oregon writing and grammar courses, I feel like I am able to wade through the mania of punctuation. I was looking around on the Internet today and came across, my new secret obsession Grammar Girl.
Grammar Girl provides “quick and dirty tips to better writing.” It is a fun site. I discovered today that the site had a new entry about hyphens. So, I had to listen to it. Since hyphens have always been a problem for me I found it particularly interesting. The podcast broke the complex rules down to a few simpler rules.
Basically, a hyphen can typically be used before a noun because hyphens ten to help modify nouns. So, a good quick rule of thumb is that they go before nouns. There are exceptions to this rule, but the podcast by Grammar Girl goes more in depth. It was a great podcast. It was really informative and really helped clarify a form of punctuation that has always baffled me.
