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grammar and writing tutorial lessons

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Punctuation

The period or full stop

The comma

Connecting clauses

Lists in a sentence

Separating lists of adjectives

Parenthetical phrases

Introductory phrases

Quotation marks

Using single quotation marks

The exclamation mark or exclamation point

The question mark

The colon

When to capitalise after a colon

The semicolon

The apostrophe

Making words plural using apostrophes

The hyphen

Dividing words at the end of a line

Using hyphens to create compound numbers

Using hyphens to avoid confusion

Using hyphens to join words together to form adjectival phrases

Using hyphens with prefixes

Using hyphens for position descriptions

The em and en dash

Parentheses

Brackets

The forward slash

To indicate choice between multiple options

For dates

Fractions

The ellipsis or dot dot dot

Dividing words at the end of a line

When you’re using a word processor on a computer, you do not need to worry about hyphens at the end of a line to split words over the two lines - if a word needs to be split, the software will just dump the whole word onto the next line instead. However, when you’re writing by hand, you may still need to split words over two lines. If possible, try to think about how long each word you write is going to be, and if it’s not going to fit, just put it on the next line.

If you do need to split a word at the end of a line, try to put the hyphen after a complete syllable or number of syllables:

If you need to split a word that is already hyphenated, just split it where the hyphen already is. Try to avoid leaving one or two letters of a word either at the end or the start of a line:

Split the words instead at a different syllable (or best of all, don’t split it at all):

Click here to move on to the next topic: Using hyphens to create compound numbers