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Paul Pehrson wondered: <<Today I talked to my supervisor about a
problem with auto hyphenation in Frame. Using Frame's help, I figured
out how to disallow hyphenation for certain words. As we were
discussing this topic, he told me that recently another writer told him
that "good technical writing" doesn't use hyphens, and we should update
our template documents to turn off auto hyphenation.>>
That's an overly simplistic statement that rolls a whole bunch of
issues into one blanket recommendation. There's no question that words
hyphenated at the right margin can be slightly more difficult to
understand than unhyphenated words: the reader must recognize the
hyphen, interpret it as meaning "assemble the first part with the
second part to create a single word", then interpret that word. That's
two steps more than is required in the absence of the hyphenation. But
if you manually review the hyphenation to ensure that it's effective
(ideally using words split at syllables--"dictionary-based
hyphenation"--rather than "split by algorithm"), hyphenation only
imposes a minor cognitive burden on the reader.
Hyphenation is most necessary in fully justified text; in its absence,
the software may create sometimes-large rivers of white space that
interfere with reading. It's also true that fully-justified text can be
slightly less readable than ragged-right text, though mostly because of
the aforementioned rivers or (in inferior typesetting software) because
the justification has been poorly implemented, leading to wildly uneven
word spacing. So if you're using full justification, hyphenation is
sometimes necessary; however, if you're using ragged-right, it can
still be necessary to correct large gaps at the right margin.
Last but not least, there's hyphenation to create compound words.
Hyphens can greatly increase the ease of comprehension for simple
compound adjectives, usually made up of no more than 2-3 words. The
problem arises when, as is often the case with engineers and
scientists, the author stacks half a dozen words before the noun to
create a huge compound adjective. In this case, the hyphens do indeed
clarify the meaning of the compound, but the meaning would be easier to
understand if you unroll the compound: for example, turn "a
six-word-long-per-instance compound" would become "a compound that was
six words long in each instance" or similar wording.
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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