Here is a sentence that appeared in Jerry Underwood's financial column in The Birmingham News recently:
For Compass, the cuts in Birmingham come after a decades-long growth trajectory that made it one of the Birmingham-area's top employers with 3,000 workers.
A good "hyphen rule of thumb" is that two descriptive words put together to create an adjective should be hyphenated. Therefore, decades-long is correct because it becomes one adjective that describes "growth trajectory."
However, Birmingham-area's is incorrect because "Birmingham" describes "area," which is a noun (top employers of the Birmingham area).
The sentence should read as follows:
For Compass, the cuts in Birmingham come after a decades-long growth trajectory that made it one of the Birmingham area's top employers, with 3,000 workers.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
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2 comments:
How should I hyphenate the examples below?
1. The boy put a ball in the six foot square box.
2. The box was six feet square.
3. The box was six and a half feet long by 3 feet wide?
4. The eighteen and a half month old boy.
5. The boy is eighteen and a half months old.
(Thanks!)
To JimK-III:
The hyphen rule to apply here is to hyphenate a compound adjective that appears BEFORE the noun it describes. You would hyphenate these examples:
1. The boy put a ball in the six-foot-square box.
4. The eighteen-and-half-month-old boy....
NOTE: Some contemporary business writers no longer hyphenate ages as in #4.
The other half of this rule is that, when the describing adjectives come AFTER the noun and the verb, you do not hyphenate them. You would NOT hyphenate these examples:
2. The box was six feet square.
3. The box was six and a half feet long by three feet wide. (NOTE: If "six" is written out, "three" should also be written out.
5. The boy is ighteen and a half months old.
Hope that helps. Thanks for visiting my blog!
Ruth Cook
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