: Re: Use double or triple minus hyphen (-) to stand in for em dash? Should I use -- or --- to stand in for — ? I've seen people use double hyphen minus, but some apparently use triple. It

@Gloria285

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I worked as senior technical editor for 16 years for three major telecom companies (all based outside the U.S.) that had adopted English as their corporate language for all documentation; all the writers wrote in English. I always made a point of showing the writers how to enter the correct punctuation characters. Since typewriters were not an issue, we never used two or three hyphens in place of an en or em dash. Since the en dash is almost always used to show a range of numbers or connect non-hyphenated terminology, an en dash would never replace the em dash. Because there are many technical terms that are hyphenated, we all agreed that a space before and after the em dash clearly distinguished from hyphens in general and tended to increase readability.

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