Hacker News

1211 readers

925 users here now

Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.

The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.

founded 7 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How to use an en-dash and em-dash correctly? (BrE) (www.lighthouseproofreading.co.uk)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

1 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

When translating things professionally I use the standards of the target language. Informally, though... screw it, I use my own punctuation conventions across multiple languages:

instead of en dash, tilde for ranges; e.g. 19:00~22:00.
no em dash either - I use space, hyphen, space.
generally I avoid single quotation marks, by default I use double.
nested marks become guillemets; e.g. "she said «fuck this shit» and left"
nested parentheses become square brackets; e.g. "I'm not buying cheese (although I love it [specially gorgonzola and emmenthaler]). Except if I'm writing about phonetics/phonology, then I simply rephrase the sentence.
I use the semicolon a fair bit; perhaps even more than the comma.