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Terminology question: dashes and Microsoft style guide?
Subject:Terminology question: dashes and Microsoft style guide? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 30 May 2001 15:16:16 -0400
Brenda Reynolds reports that: <<The MS Manual of Style basically says that
an en dash, not a hyphen, should be used for compound adjectives. Here they
are: low color depth monitor
"Low color depth" seems like a compound adjective to me, and together they
modify "monitor." So would it be "low-color-depth monitor" or "low-color
depth monitor?" The former seems right to me .....>>
You're probably misinterpreting Microsoft--and if not, they make style
guides as reliable and as compliant with broadly accepted standards as their
software, which is not a compliment. <g> A simple compound adjective would
be something like the following: "A Microsoft[hyphen]based recommendation".
A compound adjective that includes an open compound would, however, use the
en dash: "A White House[en]based recommendation". It's probably the latter
that they mean.
Techwr-l tie-in: This has implications for your audience. If you wanted to
create a single unit modifier based on both a closed compound and an open
compound (e.g., a White House-representative-based recommendation), you can
apply the correct dashes and hold your breath until you're blue in the face
and it's still going to look wrong to 90% of your audience. That being the
case, rewrite it: "A recommendation based on a White House representative."
In your case, that would be "a monitor with low color depth". There's no
point being correct "by the book" if nobody but the editors know it and
everyone else thinks you made a mistake.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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