Hyphens, Dashes, and Slashes
Learn how to use hyphens, dashes, and slashes create structure throughout a text.
Hyphens, dashes, and slashes are a useful punctuation tool to divide words and make sentences easier to follow for the reader. In this lesson, we will go over what situations require each form of punctuation.
Hyphen
Hyphens are most commonly used to create compound adjective. Compound adjectives join two or more words together to create an adjective that comes before a noun. Hyphens are also used to join numbers. Let’s look at some examples.
- Example → “Post-modern literature”
- Example → “Seventeenth-century painting”
- Example → “Mother-in-law”
Note that in the examples above, the hyphen creates a compound adjective that ...