Editing Tip(s) of the Day

Dashes. Besides a regular dash, there is the en dash (–) and the em dash (—) and each is used differently. You use an en dash (the width of the letter ‘n’) to signify ranges (e.g. ‘Roughly 10–12 people showed up for the party.’) or durations (8:00 P.M.–2:00 A.M.) and an em dash (the width of the letter ‘m’) is used to connect two sentences. During my search for references for this tip, I found an excellent one at Wikipedia. It does a much better job at explaining this subject. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

If you work in HTML the codes are [without any spaces] & #8211; (en dash) and & #8212; (em dash). It really makes your pages look more professional when you use the correct dashes. More HTML codes here: www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm or www.tntluoma.com/sidebars/codes/