From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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13 Avoid line-breaking hyphens

13 Avoid line-breaking hyphens

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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13 Avoid line-breaking hyphens

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- Law 13. Avoid line-breaking hyphens. Hyphens are useful little bits of punctuation. And sometimes they're necessary to improve readability and help clarify meaning in your documents. There are some words like the word twenty-two that require a hyphen. And here the hyphen's being used to eliminate confusion and to help your readers get a quick grasp on exactly what the text is trying to say. But using hyphens to line break words is not necessary and should be avoided. So what does that mean? What are line-breaking hyphens? Line-breaking hyphens are hyphens that are automatically added by the software that you're using. These hyphens are automatically inserted when an entire word won't fit at the end of a line of text. The software is going to put the beginning of the word on the line, maybe a few characters, then the software adds a hyphen and then the software continues the rest of the word on the next line of the paragraph. And I'm sure you've seen these a lot, you probably see…

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