Hyphenation Illustration

Among the concepts I find myself explaining most to my writers are comma splices and hyphenation. (Don't get me wrong; fixing the errors and then educating authors is like crack.) I could go on an angry rant about comma splices, so it's much safer to briefly examine hyphenation. Compound nouns and compound modifiers can be sticky, and that's OK. That's why you have proofreaders/copy editors; we have to know these things (or, at the very least, we have to know how to look them up).

Let's illustrate puppy cuddler and puppy-cuddler. What's the difference, where's the confusion, and why?



A puppy cuddler is a cuddler who is a puppy. Puppy modifies cuddler. A puppy-cuddler is one who cuddles puppies. As you can see in the photo above, I am the puppy-cuddler, and Monongahela is the puppy cuddler.

As another example, is a "high school student" a student on drugs, or is it a sophomore? How can we clear this up? (With a friendly hyphenation of "high-school," of course!)

I think Strunk, White, and I would have been buds. (Prescriptivist power! ...No?)

On that note, one of my favorite reference books is The Elements of Style (illustrated). Instead of being stuffy and outdated, it provides a great review of typical English grammar and edification that should be embraced by anyone who writes. (And this one has pictures! And a foreword by baseball writer Roger Angell.)