The Perils of Hyphenation
Hyphens are not generally used when suffixes are added to words, so the resulting term is almost always closed, as ‘ladylike,’ ‘lifeless,’ ‘waterproof’ and ‘landscape’ are. However, if the word the suffix is added to already ends with two ‘l’s, a hyphen is needed before ‘-less’ and ‘-like,’ as in ‘stall-less’ and ‘fall-like.’ A hyphen is also needed when a suffix appears after a name or in rare combinations or newly coined terms: ‘London-like,’ for instance, and ‘vulture-like.’ Sometimes a word that is not technically a suffix, such as ‘style’ or ‘ready,’ appears as a suffix to form an adjective, in which case a hyphen is generally used, as it is in ‘computer-style graphics’ and ‘a camera-ready copy.’
Hyphens are generally used in verbs formed from noun compounds consisting of two words, so ‘to cross-reference’ is the verb derived from ‘a cross reference.’ Conversely, a noun formed from a phrasal verb is either hyphenated or one word, which means that the verb ‘to back up’ becomes the noun ‘back-up’ or ‘backup.’
As a general rule, hyphens should not appear in foreign phrases even when they are used adjectivally before a noun, as in ‘an ad hominem argument’ or ‘a post hoc trial,’ unless the hyphens appear in the original language (a tête-à-tête conversation). This policy is sometimes used for italicised foreign phrases only, however, in which case naturalised phrases appearing in a normal roman font are treated like English phrases.
Finally, ‘soft’ or ‘floating’ hyphens present different challenges. Whereas the ‘hard’ hyphens discussed so far in these postings are deliberately and permanently positioned to join words or parts of words (or other elements such as numbers) in the formation of compounds, ‘soft’ hyphens are used to divide words at the end of the lines in a text to create a more balanced or attractive layout on the page. Soft hyphens are usually added to a document through automatic hyphenation functions such as that in Microsoft Word, but such functions have a tendency to introduce inappropriate and misleading divisions of words: ‘ex-acting’ for ‘exacting’ and ‘reap-pear’ for ‘reappear’ are good examples (see Ritter, New Hart’s Rules, 2005, Section 3.4 for a detailed discussion of the principles of word division). In addition, soft hyphens are not required in an article, and if they do happen to be, they are usually added by the publisher, so they are best avoided while writing a scholarly paper.
Whether automatic hyphenation is used or not, however, words appearing in the columns of tables will sometimes become divided in nonsensical and distracting ways because the columns are too narrow to accommodate them (for example, ‘percentage’ might be incorrectly divided over three lines to read ‘perc-enta-ge’). In tables designed to report data in an immediately discernible visual form, this is unacceptable and unattractive, so do watch for this if you are including tables in an article. If necessary, use an abbreviation, make the columns a little wider to accommodate the necessary words or restructure the tables concerned with plenty of room for the headings to appear in a legible fashion.
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