The Hyphen: A Not-So-Well-Known Rule

It's a good thing that the hyphen is not a frequently used punctuation mark because most people don't know how to use it. The hyphen is so misunderstood that many people call it a dash, which is a different punctuation mark. Someone recently asked me a trick question: "Do you hyphenate set up/set-up?" Sneaky sneaky.


It depends on how the words and words like them are used in a sentence. If they are nouns, yes; if they are verbs, no. Examples:

• The set-up of this room is good. (noun)
• Emily set up the room well. (verb)

Here are three more do's and a don't for hyphens. Use a hyphen for compound adjectives composed of a noun and an adjective, a noun and a participle, or an adjective and a participle; do not use a hyphen with an adverb and a participle:

• Laura needs camera-ready art for the brochure. (noun + adjective = hyphen)
• Meghan wants a custom-built car. (noun + participle = hyphen)
• Nancy takes an open-minded position on this issue. (adjective + participle = hyphen)
• Richard is a widely known firefighter. (adverb + participle = no hyphen) 

For that last bullet point, remember to avoid the hyphen with words ending in ly. Oxford Dictionaries provides excellent guidance on hyphen usage.

Book Review: "How Fiction Works"

How Fiction Works by James Woods is a provocative and accessible musing for writers and readers of prose—and it offers excellent insights whether the interest is fiction or nonfiction. Woods cites passages from the Western Canon, including Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Saramago, and Woolf, among many others, to get to the essence of narration, character, plot, detail, and dialogue.

Woods’s references to other master novelists and critics, and even painters and police chiefs, make for engaging reading on a topic that transforms the casual reader to the well informed one. Among the best moments from the author himself are these:

• The writer’s job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring (33).
• Rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out (196).
• The writer’s—or critic’s, or reader’s—task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style—in any style—which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced (233).
• Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry (247).

If these summative points resonate for you, then How Fiction Works is worth your time.

Those Darn Articles, Part 4: Possessive Pronoun Substitutes

[NOTE: For earlier parts in this series, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]


The definite articles (the) and the indefinite article (a, an) can be  replaced by possessive pronouns (i.e., my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose). In the examples below, notice how the articles in the first sentences are correctly replaced by possessive pronouns in the second sentences:

• The book is on the desk. / My book is on your desk.
• A house is in the city. / His house is in her city.
• The agency's job requires an engineer. / Its job requires our engineer.
• Does a project call for an expert. / Whose project calls for their expert?

Social Media and Communication, Part 4: Selecting Content

In determining what is and is not acceptable to post on your social media platform, keep in mind these guidelines:

• Set clear expectations - Tell your appointed contributors about the kind of content that you want and why you want it. The why goes back to establishing your aim.
• Loosen the leash - You already have chosen your contributors wisely, so now it's time to give them the space to get creative without the worry of constantly wondering whether you are looking over their shoulders, ready to censor them.
• Uphold your organization's dignity - You still may find times that censorship is important, including when a writer might be posting a message for irrelevant political purposes; for unfair criticism or inflammatory commentary directed toward an individual, group, or idea; for self-promoting messages that override the organizational image. Remember: you're paying for the platform and the contributors, so you retain the right to determine the content.
• Control the quality of the language - Needless to say, you have selected contributors not only for their understanding of your aim but for the command of language. The quality of writing must be there. This means the content must be relevant and complete; the paragraphs must be organized, emphatic, and focused; the sentences must be clear, concise, and direct; and the words must be correct and appropriate.
• Debrief regularly - Meet your contributors periodically--the more frequently the better--to tell them which posts ring truest to your ideal for the platform and which could have been improved with the inclusion or deletion of a certain content.

Social Media and Communication, Part 3: Authorizing Users

Once you answer the questions about establishing the aim of your social media platform, it's time to decide who will contribute to it. You should decide on this issue in two parts:

• Internal Contributors - who on the staff will be allowed to post regularly on the platform  
• External Contributors - whether you will allow limited or unlimited comments or likes from your readership

These are not easy decisions, as they will determine the ultimate style and content of the platform, which I will discuss in the next post of WORDS ON THE LINE.

Social Media and Communication, Part 2: Establishing the Aim

The first order of business in social networking is establishing an aim. This means clearly answering a series of questions:

• Will the platform be for employees only? For select clients? For the world?
• Is your aim to deliver valuable industry-specific information to readers?
• How relevant should the information be to the products and services you deliver? 
• Will you use the platform to announce new products or services? 
• Is the idea to get your staff more involved in pushing the organization's message? 
• Are you using the platform trying to increase your organization's visibility? 
• Will you use it to bring people to your sales center website?
• Will it use advertisements as a source of generating income?
• What should the platform look like?
• Do you want it to maintain an image that matches the formality level of your organizational brand, or do you want it to be less formal?
• Should you maintain only one platform, or have one platform for each service or group of services?
• Do you have the necessary staff to keep the platform fresh and dynamic?

You'll have a lot of questions to answer before going live, but you should weigh each of them carefully and articulate your answers unequivocally.

Social Media and Communication, Part 1: Creating a Policy

When something new happens to you two times in the same week, you take notice; when it happens three times, as it had to me last week, you think you're experiencing a trend. Within days of each other, three of my clients talked to me about their new social media policy to regulate staff usage of social media platforms not only at work but after hours as well if staff choose to identify themselves as employees of the company. 


Two points make this phenomenon important:

• The three clients are in entirely different industries (education, investment banking, and transportation). Anecdotal as this data may seem, I take it to mean that the concern is pervasive.
• All three have an email policy, as do most organizations, but felt compelled to create a social media policy because message boards, blogs, and other community e-communication tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are far different from email.

Companies will have a hard time completely forbidding the use social media because they themselves are deeply invested in a social media presence of their own, and they will likely encourage their staff to contribute to these platforms. 


Over the next three posts of Words on the Line, I will share best practices for those who are creating a social media policy of their own or modifying the one they already have.