Overcoming Hyphenphobia by Mary McWilliams Johnson     Who's afraid of the little old hyphen? Apparently a lot of folks. It's strange, but the tiny little hyphen seems to make grown men quake in terror. They harbor deep-seated notions that hyphens are bad...clutter up the place...are "bad form." The result is they simply don't deal with them. No hyphens, no problem. If you suffer from hyphenphobia, let me rescue you from your false notions. You'll love the little critters when you learn when and where to use them to make your writings easier to read. Take, for instance, this sentence. What's wrong with it? "It was a state of the art, not a run of the mill design." Wouldn't you rather read: "It was a state-of-the-art, not a run-of-the-mill design." The rule invoked here is that when two or more words are used as a compound adjective, they must be brought together as a single unit by way of hyphens. This is true of any two- or three-word groupings whose meaning as a modifier necessarily involves their use together. Example: "He used a four-letter word." Neither four nor letter could be used without the other to express the correct meaning. You wouldn't say "...a four word" or "...a letter word." No, the only way to let the reader quickly grasp the meaning is to group the two words together with a hyphen since they comprise a single adjective. The same is true of compound adjectives such as four-foot, two-thirds, six-dollar, easy-to-use, hard-to-handle, ready-made, long-suffering, etc. I hope I won't confuse you when I mention that there is one exception to this rule: When the first word of a compound modifier is an adverb ending in -ly, the hyphen is omitted. Examples: highly suspicious act, freely given affection, wholly accurate description. Hyphenating at the end of a text line Fortunately, you don't often have to make a decision about hyphenating a word at the end of a line of text since today's word processors do a pretty good job of hyphenating for this purpose. If you must make a decision, your dictionary has a ready answer for you. And you can always override the word processing program's hyphenating choices. You can even tell the program not to hyphenate at all. Most sophisticated word processing programs allow you to prevent a hyphenated compound word or phrase from breaking at the end of a line by using a "nonbreaking hyphen." For example, you might use nonbreaking hyphens to keep the word "forget-me-not" on the same line. Or you can use "optional hyphens" that say, "If you must break this word, do it here." Hyphens are our friends As you struggle against your natural aversion to hyphens, just repeat over and over, "Hyphens are our friends; hyphens are wonderful little helpers." Soon you'll be peppering your documents with hyphens just like the pros.