Welcome to my first tutorial on grammar for developers! I strive to educate all of you to make your game more professional (by correcting common grammatical errors)! I’ll make it easy to understand so that I don’t take up too much of your time. :3
Okay! Hyphenation. A lot of our games have tutorials, and most of the time, that’s a lot of writing, so to look good, you obviously want to avoid grammatical errors! I often see developers using hyphens incorrectly, so let’s start. I’ll teach you guys about the most common usage, compound adjectives.
Compound Adjectives with Hyphens
Before we go onto this, I just want to make sure that everyone knows what an adjective is. An adjective is simply “a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it” (as defined by Google).
So, what is a compound adjective? A compound adjective is when you have two or more adjectives (and sometimes other types of words) forming one. They are used in the same fashion as “normal” adjectives, so don’t stress out about it. The main difference is hyphenation; you need to put a hyphen between the adjectives/other kinds of words that make up the compound adjective. Here are a few examples:
Correct: Benjamin picked up a worm-ridden apple.
Incorrect: Benjamin picked up a worm ridden apple.
Correct: Liza loves salty-tasting chips.
Incorrect: Liza loves salty tasting chips.
Of course, English is weird, so there’s always an exception. When you have a compound adjective after the noun it is grammatically related to, you are not required to use hyphens. But English is even weirder than that—there are some words that always need hyphens, so your best friend is a dictionary.
Correct: The apple Benjamin picked up was worm ridden.
Correct: The apple Benjamin picked up was worm-ridden.
They’re both acceptable, but you should stay consistent!
We’re almost done with this one. All I need to say now is that you do not hyphenate adverbs that modify an adjective unless you’re using the word well, which is an exception. Off to the second topic!
Compound Adjectives with En Dashes
Hyphen: -
En dash: –
Em dash (North American style): —
Most people ask what an en dash (–) is whenever I bring it up. It’s not very different from the hyphen, and although it does have a variety of usages, I’m only going to go over one, and, as you know, we’re going over compound adjectives.
Usually, en dashes are used for more complex compound adjectives, but, in this case, they are optional; you could get away with hyphens, so don’t freak out. For example, there are times when you may have compound words inside a compound adjective. You guys are going to hate me for this, but most of you are going to have to copy and paste the en dash.
Correct: The polar bear–infested igloo is over there!
Incorrect: The polar bear infested igloo is over there!
Correct: He used David Baszucki–style presentation techniques.
Incorrect: He used David Baszucki style presentation techniques.
I’m really tempted to go more in-depth with the last example, but we’ll leave it here. Maybe I’ll have a post for en dashes one day, but I definitely know I’ll post more tutorials soon, and I hope this helps make your games more professional. Good luck impressing your English teacher!
I love English. uwu
