From the course: Writing with Proper Punctuation
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When to use suspensive hyphens
From the course: Writing with Proper Punctuation
When to use suspensive hyphens
- Here's a neat little trick you can play with hyphens. It's called suspensive hyphenation and it lets you get away with fewer words or show how people really talk. Say you're writing about timed tests, and you're administering 30-minute tests and 60-minute tests. Instead of writing all that out, you can use a suspensive hyphen to make it a little shorter and write that you're administering 30- and 60-minute tests by just putting a single hyphen after the 30. To use them, you put a lone hyphen after the first part of a compound modifier without the second part for all but the last item in a list. Here's some more examples. You can ask whether something is a two-, three-, or four-bedroom house. Or whether someone was wearing a red- or blue-striped shirt. You usually don't have to use suspensive hyphens, but they can be a nice tool when you're trying to keep your writing short. And they may be necessary when you're…
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