On August 27, 2011 at 18:35, davidcasemore said...
So, Ernie, your fishing rod is made of wire? I bet it's not strong enough to reel in the big ones!
Oh, maybe you meant wire-fishing rod(?)
Paragraphs could be written on the proper and improper use of dashes, especially these days. Yup, I meant what you said.
Recently, I've seen no dashes at all in writings from England, where we'd put dashes all over the place. And American writing from fifty years ago has many fewer dashes. For a good example, read "Atlas Shrugged." In fact, reading that book will make you a better American, no matter what you believe now.
What bothers me most is that people will write "high-end amp," which I find proper, but then will talk about the "high-end." To me, the two words used together as an adjective require a dash, but when used as a noun with an adjective, don't.
Thanks for the catch. I never mind talking about these things, because the intent of using the dash or leaving it out is to make the writing easier to read. If you've written in such a way that the reader has to stop dead in a sentence to figure out what the hell the words mean, or how they go together, you've written poorly. The writing should be so assembled that the reading just flows. A perfect instance of this is using "your" when you mean "you're."
P.S. No, you didn't make that last error, but see how you had to stop and look to see if you had, to see why I mentioned it?
