“MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH” — example news headline from Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style
The rule is that you use hyphens for compound modifiers like the ones in natural-language processing, high-impact opportunities, cost-effectiveness measures, high-status employers, and so on. Don’t break up compound proper nouns (“New York-based company”) and don’t use them after adverbs ending in -ly but do use them after other adverbs (“stern-looking boss”). You can use suspended hyphens when talking about “latex- and phthalate-free gloves.”
But hyphens are under attack. The Chicago Manual of Style “prefers a spare hyphenation style.” The AP Stylebook says that “the fewer hyphens the better.” In older texts you see a lot more hyphenation than you do today.
Part of this is because of a good trend of combining compound nouns, turning e-mail and fire-fly into email and firefly. But part of it involves replacing hyphens with spaces, turning high-school seniors and ice-cream cones into high school seniors and ice cream cones. Some people think hyphens just look bad.
But hyphens are excellent because they improve the readability of text—the speed at which it can be understood, even at a less-than-perceptible level. In fact, it would probably be an improvement to language if it became acceptable and normal to hyphenate compound nouns simply to make the noun phrase faster to read. But first I hope we can return to making references to chocolate-chip cookies.
Skimming the curated posts that are on LessWrong right now, as a random sample:
- A Shutdown Problem Proposal → A Shutdown-Problem Proposal
- hopefully-corrigible agent → hopefully corrigible agent
- large scale X → large-scale X
A good example of hyphen use: “to make any child-agents it creates responsive-but-not-manipulative to the shutdown button, recursively.”
I find [the use of square brackets to show the merge structure of [a linguistic entity that might otherwise be confusing to parse]] delightful :)
Refactoring your writing for clarity is taxing and will reduce overall word count on LW. That would be an improvement for some users but not others.
I know some major offenders when it comes to unnecessary-hyphenation-trains, but usually I still find all their posts and comments net positive.
Of course, I would be happy if those users could increase clarity without sacrificing other things.