#Em dash for mac how to
#Em dash for mac mac

This is because, in most fonts, the em dash actually includes a little bit of extra space to the left or right. Now notice I didn't put any extra spaces around the em dash. So a hyphen is just pressing the hyphen key. Now to type the em dash you hold the Option and the Shift key down. The quick brown fox-though he looks more red than brown to me-jumps over the lazy dog.

What's the em dash used for? Well, it's used basically just like parentheses or as an aside in some text. n is a shorter letter and m is twice of an n in width so that's the em dash. This is a wider dash and you can guess from the name that it's supposed to be the width of the letter m, rather than the letter n. That's pretty much what you use the en dash for. Option and hyphen gives you the en dash, a longer one. So notice the regular hyphen how short that is.

This gives you a different character than the regular hyphen. How do you type the en dash? Well you hold the Option key down on your keyboard and you press the hyphen key. So, for instance, if you want to say seven to ten you could say 7 and then the en dash to 10. You use this in cases where you're going to have a range of things. It's called en dash because the dash is about the size, the width, of the letter n.

#Em dash for mac how to

It's usually spelled en although there's some debate on how to actually write down the word en dash. So the first type of dash I want to talk about is called the en dash. But there are other places you would be using a dash. Those are the only places you should be using a hyphen. So when you see a hyphenated name you would use the hyphen. It's also used to separate numbers in things like telephone numbers. But if you do make sure you just type the plain normal hyphen that's on your keyboard. Now, sometimes, depending upon which dictionary you're using, you may not use a hyphen on any of these. It's usually to the right of the zero on American keyboards and is the correct one of use. So, for instance, you may want to type a compound word like this, well-liked, and using the hyphen on your keyboard. Many of us use the hyphen for all of the different dashes. One of them, the one we use most often, is actually not even called a dash.

There are three different types of dashes. Now this is one thing when talking about letters and words. Video Transcript: So whether writing a book, an email, or text message a lot of us like to be grammatically correct when typing on our computers.

#Em dash for mac mac

Check out How and When To Type En and Em Dashes On a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.