I’m thinking this might boil down to “personal preference”, but I can’t seem to find any direct answers as to whether it’s best perception-wise to use one hyphen, two hyphens (as I see more and more) or no hyphen at all? The trend seems to be going towards two, but I can’t see or find what the relevance is. Can you elaborate?
— Chris
The OC
There are at least three distinct names for those little horizontal lines used in English.
A **hyphen** is the shortest of these, and is used to break a word into syllables (i.e. hyphenation). You also use hyphens to make compound words like inside-out. On your keyboard, it’s probably next to the plus sign, so it’s fair to conflate it with “minus.”
A **dash** is a punctuation mark. An **en-dash** is commonly used for ranges, such as “6–10 years.” An **em-dash** is longer, and used to set off a phrase—often a parenthetical thought, like this—from the rest of the sentence.
With most typefaces, you can and should use en-dashes and em-dashes instead of just automatically hitting the hyphen. You can use a special key combination, ((On a Mac, you make an en-dash with option-hyphen and the em-dash with shift-option-hyphen.)) but many applications will automatically choose the right one based on context, such as converting two hyphens into an em-dash.
Em-dashes in particular just look better. And you don’t need to put spaces around the dash.
Screenplays are set in monospace fonts like Courier. Because every letter takes up the same amount of space, a lot of what looks good in normal typefaces looks wrong in Courier. ((Notably, we still double-space after the period in Courier.)) Traditional typewriters never had “real” dashes, so the convention was to use two hyphens instead, generally set off with a space on either side.
TODD BLANDERSNOT (14) is the homeliest kid at Miskatonic Academy -- and two of Cthulu’s kids go here.
That’s what I use: two floating hyphens. Other writers jam two hyphens right at the end of a word, ((The Wibberleys do this. We rewrote once each other on a project, and it involved a lot of dash-redeployment.)) or leave a single hyphen dangling at the end of a line when cutting before the end of a sentence.
You can also simply stop a line early, with no punctuation. I often do this when the next thing will be an intermediate slugline:
Dazed, Todd scrambles to feet just as
THREE GRIFFONS
swoop down from above, snatching random classmates in their talons.
It’s all to your taste. The important thing is to pick a style and stay consistent throughout the script.