Punctuation: Hyphenation rules

September 29, 2005: Issue 107

Some rules to keep in mind about hyphenation in body copy:

• Don’t end a line on a hyphen in rag-right or centered text, unless the word that’s breaking is a hyphenated compound that breaks at the grammatical hyphen.

• Don’t let two lines in a row end in hyphens.

• Don’t break words within a hyphenated compound.

• Don’t let a word break at the end of a column.

• When a word breaks, make sure at least three letters appear on the second line. When possible, keep a prefix or suffix from breaking from the rest of the word.

• Don’t hyphenate proper nouns.

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