David,
Gotta side with Ed on this one. According to most style guides, using
hyphen, space, hyphen is wrong, it should be word, en dash, word without
any spaces in between. Also, word, hyphen, word is appropriate but
again, without spaces. But as you both agreed on (maybe a first!) this
actions can be changed using the settings in Auto Correct. Of course,
there is also the em dash, which some style guides approve as a 'rare'
alternative to a comma: I used to try to act as a mediator—I had more
energy and higher hopes back then—but I have since given up. My own
preferences - the one I use all the time - is a space hyphen space....
Mike
I came across this:
Your British colleagues might be following Judith Butcher’s
Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors, and
Publishers, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
which advises using what it calls “en rules” “to convey a distinction in
sense” (section 6.12.1; note that it is also the common British practice
to use an en dash with a word space on either side where American
publishers would use an em dash closed up to the surrounding words).
This allows one to write, for example, “U.S.–British relations” to mean
relations between the United States and Britain. The en dash is supposed
to convey something more than simply relations that are characterized or
modified, independently, by the United States and Britain. And while
editors here like such a subtle distinction, we do not believe that it
is useful enough to mandate, and therefore we prefer the hyphen (e.g.,
U.S.-British relations). En dashes instead of hyphens should be used
between words in running text only as a last resort—usually to bridge an
open compound, as you suggest—and even then it’s probably fair to assume
that most readers will see a hyphen.
