COPY QUIRKS

EM DASH (—)

Used to separate clauses, create a pause in a sentence, or emphasize a point. DO NOT include spaces before or after the dash.

The Playfoam products—Playfoam Classic, Playfoam Pluffle, Playfoam Sand, and Playfoam Naturals are great for...

The Playfoam products are great for sensory stimulation they’re really great.

Note: To type an Em dash on a Mac computer, simultaneously click Shift, Option, and Hyphen/Minus.

EN DASH (–)

Typically used to show the relationship between numbers, words, or dates. You can use it in place of versus, number ranges, and scores. DO NOT include spaces before or after the dash.

The Celtics–Warriors’ game was last night. The score was 102–93.

It can take 1–2 hours to get there, depending on traffic.

Note: To type an En dash on a Mac computer, simultaneously click Option and Hyphen/Minus.

HYPHEN (-)

Used to combine compound words and numbers. You also use a hyphen when two words are being joined as an adjective to describe another word. DO NOT include spaces before or after the dash, unless you are using it to communicate a subtraction/minus sign ( - ). Also used in the place of bullet points sometimes.

My grandma is turning ninety-nine this year.

Playfoam is sensory-stimulating!

Kanoodle® is a line of brain-bending puzzle games!

Parenthesis

Punctuation goes around parenthesis when the parenthesis (and words inside it) are part of the sentence. If the parenthesis exists as an independent sentence, punctuation goes inside.

The box also doubles as storage (with handle)

One of my favorite things is to play with Playfoam. (I have a brick of it at my desk.)

Quotation Marks

In most cases, punctuation will go inside quotation marks (Ex: “That’s great!”). If you ever have a quotation inside another quotation, the inner quote will use single marks on either side.

“And then she said, ‘Yeah that’s fine’ so I went on my way.”

Bullets

Bullets are a useful organizational tool to break up long blocks of text or to list features, benefits, components, etc. Here are some general rules of bullets:

• Be consistent in syntax. If one bullet begins with an action word, the rest of the bullet series should also start with an action word

• DO NOT punctuate the end of bullets when bullets have introductory copy like “Including:”

• Use sentence casing (capitalize first letter and lowercase every other word)