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.
1 response so far ↓
ggonerka // February 20, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Have you ever wondered why grammar is so strongly stressed in college? Obviously we’re journalism students and we are going to be writing for a living, but you would think that with over 12 years of writing that grammar would be second nature. But with my experience in college and it seems yours as well, it’s clear that students aren’t learning these vital writing skills in their primary education. I think this is a serious issue, I went through high school thinking I was a rock star writer and got into my first Writing 121 class and failed my first paper because of all the grammar mistakes I didn’t even know I had made. Don’t you think it’s too late and unfortunate to wait to learn these skills at age 20? I do.
Good topic!