Punctuation – Hyphens, dashes, brackets, and slashes
Hyphens and dashes
Hyphens are used to link words, or parts of words, to give new meanings. The most common example of using hyphens can be seen with combining two or more words that come before a noun that they act to modify, for example:
Sugar-free soda
In this example, the hyphenated words change the meaning of the noun ‘soda’.
📝 Exercise: Get a pen and paper, or open a document on your computer, and try to make a list of 10 different hyphenated words like the example above.
Having a few examples stored in your memory can be good for when the topic might come up during one of your lessons.
As for dashes, there are two different types that exist. The en dash is primarily used to indicate a span of time between numbers or dates, while the em dash indicates a break in speech or thought:
The material is in chapters 7-9.
The day was finally over – or so she thought.
The primary differences between hyphens and dashes are their use as well as their appearance. Hyphens do not have spaces around them, whereas em dashes have a space on either side of them. The size of each type of dash is also different, with the hyphen the smallest and the em dash the largest.
These punctuation types are not used very often, and are getting less popular with time. For this reason, they should be taught when they naturally come up in your lessons, or when dealing with advanced writing classes.
Slashes
The forward slash is used primarily to indicate the word ‘or’ without writing it.
Someone had left his/her phone in the room.
This punctuation type is usually used in informal writing when giving examples or describing alternatives. It can be useful to explain to students as you may use it on the whiteboard during your classes.
Parentheses/brackets
These are parentheses (), and are often known as simply being ‘brackets’. However, the term bracket actually refers to the angular kind [], and has a different use.
Parentheses are used in a number of types of writing, can be replaced by commas in most cases, and add additional or surplus information to a sentence. In contrast, brackets are usually used in technical writing or to add extra information that clarifies the situation.
The party (which was usually held every year) was cancelled because of the storm.
It was the last time their parents saw them [the missing girls].
For most students, learning to use parenthesis to add extra information to a sentence will be useful enough. However, if you have a more advanced class, you could practice the different uses of brackets and parenthesis by giving the students sentences, and having them add certain pieces of information with the appropriate punctuation. With this, they’ll need to assess if the information was essential to understand the context of the sentence or not.