Punctuation: Important for academic and published writing. Not a bad idea if you just want to be understood.
A reader asked about the difference between a minus symbol and an N-dash (thanks Tem). I had to do a bit of homework on this. Unicode (the standard for electronically encoding text information) …
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Yeah, well, the F-bomb – it’s become as ubiquitous as the word ‘like.’ People just throw the word ‘like’ around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.
-Geoffrey Rush
In lots of writing, the use of dashes is very inconsistent – regardless of how ‘professional’ the writers are.
The hyphen, dash, n-dash and m-dash crop-up all the time in Microsoft Word but most of us don’t know why, and we use them inconsistently. The fact is that the n-dash and m-dash are very useful and easy to use – whether you follow the rules or break them (but it’s best to break rules consistently).