All rules

Hyphen used as a dash

hyphen-as-dashon by default (info)English

A spaced hyphen or a double hyphen standing in for a dash

Example

Flagged
The release is late - very late.
What chaff prints
1:20 "-" stands in for a dash
Fixed
The release is late — very late.
What chaff prints
no finding

How to fix

Use a dash (— or –), or rewrite with a comma or a colon.

Why it matters

A spaced hyphen ("late - very late") or a double hyphen ("late--very late") stands in for a dash (— or –). A hyphen joins words, so the reader stops for a moment to see whether it is part of one.

What it does not flag

Only between words. A list marker ("- "), a number range ("1 - 2"), a hyphen inside a word ("well-known") and code are not reported. Nor is the hyphen that sets a numbered division's label apart from its title in a heading ("PART I - THE AGENCIES GENERALLY"). Nor is "--" in a document that sets no dash as a character (— or –), where it is how the document types its dash, as plain-text standards and Markdown typographers do. The literature presets turn it off, since older printed texts set the dash as "--".

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: hyphen-as-dash — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax hyphen-as-dash --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules: hyphen-as-dash: off
Technical details
Layer
L1
Status
stable
Severity
info
Languages
en
Suited to
business, technical, blog, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech

Levels

Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).

strictreported once there are 1
normalreported once there are 1
relaxedreported once there are 3

By genre

Runs by default in
technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper, speech/address, speech/transcript
Turned off by the genre in
literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play

Genres

Message

"{matched}" stands in for a dash

Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay

This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/hyphen-as-dash.yaml