Dashes; Hypens; Quotation marks

DASHES
A dash is a way of forcing your reader to pause. It can be used singly or in pairs, and can be useful when you want to show a break in thought e.g.
Faulty brakes cause accidents – some of them serious.
I went to the police station – as you guessed I would – to bail him out.


HYPHENS
Hyphens are used for 2 very different purposes:
1. To make 2 words into a single adjective before a noun.
She dived into the deep-blue sea. (The colour blue was deep.)

NOTE: The hyphen is ONLY used when the ADJECTIVE comes immediately before a NOUN e.g.
Michelle Yeoh is a well-known Malaysian BUT Michelle Yeoh is well known in Malaysia.

2. A hyphen is used to split a word divided between 2 lines e.g.
accom-
modation

Writing is easier to read if words are not divided, so avoid dividing them. Since 1 syllable standing alone looks odd, try too avoid hyphenating words with fewer than four syllables. If you have four or more syllables in a word and are not sure how the syllables are divided, check a dictionary.


QUOTATION MARKS
Quotation marks are used to draw attention to words in several ways:

1. Use double quotation marks at the very beginning and very end to quote directly from speech or writing. Use single quotation marks to set off a quotation within a quotation:

Ang said, “I heard him say, ‘I won’t go’ but I noticed he did go.”

2. Use quotation marks to draw special attention to a word or phrase, but not to apologise for one. I am not sure what “commission” really means.

3. Use quotation marks to indicate the title of something that makes up part of a published work. When you are writing a paragraph, put the title of an article within journal, for instance, or a poem within a collection, in inverted commas, single or *double.

NOTE: *This rule applies to paragraphs, but not to all types of bibliography. In the APA format, you do not use quotation marks for titles of articles or chapters.

The group, Beyond, sang “Karm Tin Ngo” beautifully.