If you’re a high school English teacher who dreads the moment punctuation lessons roll around, you’re not alone—especially when you need to teach hyphens and dashes. 

To your students, these horizontal lines look similar. But their variety of uses, subtle rules, and even how to type them on standard keyboards are leaving your students totally confused!

The good news? With the right examples and a little clarity, you can teach hyphens and dashes with confidence—and even help your students master using them!

Keep reading if you’re ready to read essays with a little more sentence variety. In this post, I’ll go over hyphen and dash rules, common usage, and the different types of dashes. I’ll even cover tricky concepts like compound adjectives, numeric ranges, and word breaks.

If, however, you’re not looking to DIY your lesson, you can save yourself a ton of time and skip to the good part with this Hyphens and Dashes Lesson!

It includes everything you need to teach hyphens, dashes, and the differences between them. This lesson includes a slideshow presentation, worksheets, student handout, exit tickets, and more!

Before You Teach Hyphens and Dashes: Teaching Prerequisites

Before diving into hyphens and dashes, you should make sure your students are ready for them. A random lesson on these punctuation marks won’t serve your students if they don’t have the necessary background knowledge. 

​Make sure your students already know foundational grammar concepts before teaching hyphens and dashes:

• Sentence structure
• Independent and dependent clauses
• Optional: other, easier to master punctuation marks like the apostrophe, colon, and semicolon

As long as your students understand clauses and sentence structure, you’re probably all set for hyphens and dashes. But personally, I like to teach apostrophes first. (I think they’re easier to learn and they’re used more often.)

I also cover colons and semicolons before hyphens and dashes, but that’s mostly just preference. 

You could cover commas before hyphens and dashes, too, but I leave commas as the last bit of punctuation to cover. They just have so many rules!

(This post goes into more detail about sequencing your grammar lessons!)

First, What Are Hyphens and Dashes?

At a glance, hyphens and dashes look like short horizontal lines (and truthfully, that’s how I describe them to my students). But don’t let that fool you—they serve very different purposes in formal writing and professional writing.

• A hyphen is the shortest of the bunch. It’s used to join ​parts of words, such as in compound words or to divide words at the end of a line of text.
• An en dash (–) is about the width of the letter “n.” It often appears in ranges of numbers or between compound adjectives when one includes a proper noun.
• An em dash (—) is the longest, roughly the length of the letter “m.” It shows an abrupt change, sets off extra information, or replaces commas and colons in certain sentences.

Each of these marks of punctuation has specific use cases—and students won’t master them overnight. But with clear modeling and good examples, you can simplify them for your classroom.​

FULL DISCLOSURE: ​I don’t really go into details about the en and em dash when I teach. My focus is getting students to understand the difference between hyphens and dashes–types of dashes can come later. If you want to go into detail in your lesson, however, go for it!

The Use of a Hyphen: Your Starting Point

I like to start with hyphens. I think they’re a little easier because when we use them, we look at words instead of clauses.

The single hyphen (-) is most commonly used in the following situations:

1. Compound Adjectives: When two or more words work together to describe a noun—especially before the noun—you’ll often use hyphens.
   • Example: She turned in a well-written essay.
   • This is called a compound modifier or phrasal adjective.
2. Compound Numbers: In compound numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine.
   • Example: He is twenty-three years old.
3. Word Breaks at the End of a Line: Some word processors will add a hanging hyphen if a long word breaks across lines. This is one of the few times hyphens appear at the end of a line of text. (Our students aren’t likely to see this much. Today’s word processors can automatically move words to avoid the need for a hyphen. But on the off chance your students come across anything done on a typewriter or pick up an old edition of a book, it’s worth mentioning. This hyphen usage can be useful when handwriting though!)
4. Closed Compounds vs. Open Compounds: Some compound nouns become single words over time (notebook, snowman), while others remain separate words (high school, real estate). Students can consult a style guide or dictionary to determine the most current usage.
5. Prefixes and Suffixes: Use hyphens when adding prefixes to proper nouns (un-American), or to avoid confusion (re-sign vs. resign).
6. Phrasal Verbs: While these don’t usually need hyphens when used as verbs (look up, check in), they sometimes become hyphenated when used as nouns (check-in, follow-up).

Now Let’s Talk Dashes: Short, Long, and Confusing

In this section, I’ll break down the difference between en dashes and em dashes.

But again, I don’t go into these details in my own lesson. I just lump them together as a “dash.” It’s nearly impossible to tell the difference when handwriting, and the difference between word processors and operating systems makes differentiating between the two more challenging than I feel my students are typically ready for.

But hey, do what works for your students!

En Dashes (–)

The en dash often appears:

• In ranges of numbers or dates:
  • Example: pages 12–24, World War II (1939–1945)
  • Read as “to”: “pages twelve to twenty-four”
• Between compound adjectives when one part is a proper noun or already hyphenated (this is such a specific case of usage, I don’t typically cover it when I teach dashes, FYI):
  • Example: New York–based artist

Unlike a single hyphen, an en dash adds clarity to particular phrases that may otherwise confuse the reader.

On standard keyboards, you won’t find a key just for en dashes. In Microsoft Word, you can type it with Ctrl + minus key (on numeric keypad) or insert it from the special characters menu. On a Mac, try Option + Hyphen. (And to be honest, this is why I don’t teach the difference in dashes. Students just won’t take the time to do it “right.” Instead, I have them type a double hyphen so that their word processor auto formats them into a dash.)

Em Dashes (—)

The em dash has a wide range of uses in both academic writing and more creative contexts. Use a single em dash:

• To indicate an abrupt change in thought:
  • Example: I was going to say—well, never mind.
• In place of a colon to emphasize the conclusion of a sentence:
  • Example: She only had one thing on her mind—freedom.
• In place of commas to set off additional information:
  • Example: The students—most of whom were seniors—voted unanimously.

You can also use a pair of em dashes like parentheses. This works well for parenthetical information or to add a descriptive phrase in the middle of a complete sentence.

Common Student Mistakes to Watch For

When teaching hyphens and dashes, expect a few common usage slip-ups:

• Using hyphens instead of dashes for interruptions or emphasis
• Forgetting to hyphenate compound adjectives before nouns (to be fair, I even slip up here from time to time)
• Overusing em dashes when a comma or colon would be more appropriate (but it’s cool if they get excited to use dashes, right?!)

To reinforce these rules, consider pulling examples from real texts—or even letting students analyze the punctuation in passages from Khan Academy, New York Times articles, or literature from your curriculum.

I use the worksheets included in my Hyphens and Dashes Lesson to reinforce these ideas. They provide plenty of practice for each major concept.

Style Guide Differences

Another reason I, personally, don’t go into detail on the en vs. em dash? The rules aren’t consistent!

If you staunchly teach one particular kind of writing style, make sure you’re reinforcing the dash rules appropriately.

Not all style guides agree on every punctuation mark. Here’s a quick overview:

• Chicago Manual of Style: Uses en dashes for ranges and em dashes with no white space on either side.
• MLA Style: Similar to Chicago in em dash usage.
• AP Style: Avoids en dashes and adds spaces around em dashes.
• British English: Sometimes prefers single dash spacing, and may differ in hyphenation preferences.

Encourage students to follow whichever style guide you or your school requires—and to stay consistent.

Teach Hyphens and Dashes Tip: Make It Visual and Practical

Because the meaning of the sentence can change with a single punctuation mark, use side-by-side before vs. after comparisons to show students how punctuation affects clarity.

To do this, I include a visual hyphens and dashes student handout in my lesson. It serves as a reference guide all year.

Here are some other ideas you can try:

• Sorting compound words into hyphenated, closed, and open categories
• Editing short paragraphs with missing punctuation
• Identifying different types of dashes in printed texts
• Practicing with word processors to learn how to insert en and em dashes
• Typing practice with the alt key, hyphen key, and numeric keypad

The Last Point

Teaching hyphens and dashes may require a little extra work, but it’s well worth the effort. Understanding these subtle marks of punctuation helps students write with greater precision and confidence—especially in academic writing and standardized tests.

Using these little lines will make your students’ writing stand out when those big standardized tests come around.

​And in the meantime? You’ll get to read so much more sentence variety from your students! Honestly, it makes a difference when you’re grading a huge stack of papers!

So whether you’re breaking down a compound adjective, formatting phone numbers, or clarifying a range of numbers, you’ve got the tools to teach hyphens and dashes like a pro.

Want to save time planning your punctuation lessons? Check out my ready-to-use resource that walks students through hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes with examples, practice, and reference materials.