First the Dots, Now the Dashes

PUNCTUATION MONDAY

Confused about hyphens and dashes? Read on.

The Hyphen

The hyphen is the short straw of the bunch. It’s located on your keyboard between the 0 and the =. A hyphen is used to combine words (well-known, third-class) and to separate numbers that are not inclusive, such as a phone number.
Example: 223-2499

The Dashes

Believe it or not there are two varieties of dashes—the em dash and the en dash. The en dash is the width of a typesetter’s letter N, whereas the em dash is the width of the letter M—thus their names.

• The Em Dash

1. Use a pair of em dashes to set off material that deserves emphasis.
Example: Everything went wrong—from the engine trouble at the beginning to the bad hotel rooms at the end—during our two-week vacation.

2. Use a dash to prepare for a list, restatement, amplification or dramatic shift in thought.
Example: Clark took a few steps back, came running at the ball, took a big kick—and missed completely.

3. Use dashes to set off an appositive that contains commas. What’s an appositive? It’s a noun or noun phrase that renames a nearby noun.
Example: Gumbo—a New Orleans dish of rice, beans, okra and spicy seasonings—is our traditional New Year’s Eve dinner.

• The En Dash

It’s slightly longer than the hyphen but not as long as the em dash. It means, quite simply, through. We use it most commonly to indicate inclusive dates and numbers.
Example: July 9–August 17; pp. 37–59

It might take a bit of trial and error but eventually you’ll find the em and en dashes in a menu of symbols in your word processing program. There are usually short cuts to adding these punctuation marks to your text.

Remember that there are no spaces to be left before or after the hyphen, em or en dashes.

Baby, it's cold out there

Automotive writer Michael Bettencourt on location at the Ford testing centre in Thompson, Manitoba. Photo by Shel Zolkewich

Were you outside yesterday? I was. As I turned north on the top of a wide open ridge, two words came to mind. Wind and chill. The temperature was hovering at -10C but the howling north wind was making it feel closer to -25C. So why does the wind make it feel so much colder? Our friends at Environment Canada say that our bodies insulate us somewhat from the outside temperature by warming up a thin layer of air close to our skin, known as the boundary layer. When the wind blows, it takes this protective layer away and exposes our skin to the outside air. It takes energy for our bodies to warm up a new layer and if each one keeps getting blown away, our skin temperature will drop and we will feel colder.

For more wind chill facts, including when and why we changed from the uber-confusing Siple-Passel equation (remember when the wind chill was reported at 1,850?), visit
http://www.msc.ec.gc.ca/education/windchill/windchill_fact_sheet_aug_10_e.cfm
and bundle up out there.

How Many is a Billion?

The Los Angeles Times reports that U.S. Internet advertising revenue has exceeded $3 billion in a single quarter for the first time. The $3.1 billion for the third quarter of 2005 was a 34 per cent jump from the same period a year earlier. Revenue for the year could exceed $12 billion, well above the $9.6-billion total last year.

“Clearly advertisers are realizing the benefits of shifting more of their total advertising budgets to online,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company that crunched the numbers.

Nonetheless, online ads still represents a small portion of the total U.S. ad market, which was $71 billion during the first half of 2005, according to research firm TNS Media Intelligence.

The Freeze Up Cometh

Lake Winnipeg grows still. Her waters thicken. The northwesterly wind pushes waves up on to her silent driftwood. The creeks that fed her are already quiet with an inch of ice.

Fabulous Fish and Chips

In the mood for a fish fry? Head to Sauger Steve's in Gimli, Manitoba, Canada for a feed of the freshest catch of the day. Pickerel (pictured here)—or walleye as it's known in the United States—is the mainstay of this town's commercial fishing industry. It has been for 120 years. Each year, Gimli fishers net over 1.2 million kilograms of fish and earn close to $4 million.

The dot, dot, dot

You’ve used them. Those three little dots. I suspect that you are using them to indicate that you are thinking about something, that you are searching for just the right word, that there is more to come in this stream of consciousness. In all cases, you would be using those three little dots incorrectly.

Electronic communications has made us all a little lazy when it comes to grammar. Lowercaseness prevails, acronyms that none of us understand are everywhere and sentence structure has completely gone out the window. If you are at all interested in using those three little dots correctly, consider these pointers next time you are tapping out a note on your Blackberry.

• Three little dots are called an ellipsis.
• Ellipsis is singular; ellipses is plural.
• An ellipsis is used to indicate the omission of material from an original quote; hence, if you are writing a note to Benny and you type “See you in the morning . . . maybe we can find a good game of Dungeons and Dragons . . . I have a new cloak to wear.” you would be using these ellipses completely inappropriately. Why? Because no original material existed before you wrote this note to Benny.
• Ellipses are most often used in journalism to abbreviate a long quote and get to the heart of the matter.
• Ellipses are also used to reference other works. You might condense a line from Romeo and Juliet if you were writing an essay on star-crossed lovers. You might also use ellipses in legal documents when you are quoting other sources.
• To create an ellipsis, used three spaced periods. Add spaces before and after the ellipsis.
• If you are using an ellipsis at the end of a sentence, add a fourth period.

And The Winner Is

Many thanks to Ian McCausland and assistant Jenna for making such a slick photograph of the award I picked up last month. This is the chunk of crystal I received for winning the Globe and Mail Travel Media Award, part of the 2005 Tourism Industry Association of Canada National Awards for Tourism Excellence.

M for Murder

The other day I was editing a story about crows and ravens. I was under the impression that a group of crows was called a murder. No doubt a ‘murder of crows’ is indeed a spirited phrase. But is it accurate? The good folks at Random House say that these fanciful collective nouns are indeed accurate but vanishing rapidly.

There are the collective nouns that are familiar to everyone: flight of stairs, swarm of bees, flock of sheep and school of fish. Then there is another group. See if you can fit these in to your everyday conversation.

exaltation of larks
unkindness of ravens
shrewdness of apes
piteousness of doves

Grammar Lesson on the Road

Some people have nothing better to do than drive around southern Manitoba and take photographs of examples of improper word use. How sad.

The $5,575 Getaway

You’re out on a bigass Boston Whaler boat and all of a sudden you get a craving for a hot crab sandwich. Simply make the request and The West Coast Fishing Club’s courtesy boat delivers your snack so you can keep on fishin’. Expect nothing less at one of the country’s most exclusive and luxurious lodges.

I just filed a story for Toro magazine. It's titled Six Swanky Fishing Lodges to Visit Before You Die. The price for a four-day stay at The West Coast Fishing Club on the Queen Charlotte Islands is $5,575. Start rolling those quarters.

Snowball: Legend of the Interlake

Snowball: A Hunting Story
By Shel Zolkewich
November 2, 2005

It had been raining slow and steady for the better part of half an hour. Just enough to get a glaze on my bare hands and turn them into little ice balls. The sun had said goodnight too. Barely enough light to see across the field now and definitely too dark to shoot. It was time to gather up and start the mile-long trek back to the farmyard.
I took one last scan. A white shape tumbling across the southern edge of the field—still without snow— caught my eye. Could it be a grocery bag? Maybe. Then it suddenly disappeared. With binoculars and gun in hand, I circled the long way around the stone pile where I had been posted up through the evening. Heading for the farmhouse, I took one more look over my shoulder. The shape was back and glowing like a white t-shirt on glowbowl night. Could it be? Was I looking at the famed albino whitetail deer I had been hearing about all week? I brought my gun scope up for a closer look. Sure enough a tiny white deer—save for a dark patch on his back and a marking on his face—dropped into a lower quadrant of my scope. I wanted to scream out “How cool is that!”. Instead I decided to get as close as possible to the whitetail calf, likely born this spring. I was about 150 yards away and it was black outside by now. I took several long strides, always keeping my eye on the deer. He didn’t seem to notice. At about 100 yard, I dropped to my belly and started to crawl the rest of the way. I think this is when I lost my cellphone.
I sensed some movement to south of the deer. When I looked away, I could see two more dark shapes in my peripheral vision. Snowball wasn’t alone. By the time I got within 50 yards, there were at least eight deer clustered on the field. The socked-in sky had broken to reveal a lighter gray patch and it was in this space that I could see all eight in silhouette. The one farthest away was the biggest by far. It was too dark for me to see horns but my guess is that he was a buck. Maybe even the big five-pointer that had escaped my trigger an hour before.
I continued to crawl toward the group. And they started to move toward me. At about 20 yards away, I stopped. Snowball was leading the pack and coming straight for me. Even in the dark he glowed. And he was curious. At this point my rampant excitement started to give way to a bit of uneasiness. What if they charged me? Trampled me? Deer don’t do this. But being so close to a group of wild animals delivers a certain kind of awe. In those moments—and I’ve been lucky to have a few—it doesn’t matter that it’s cold, uncomfortable and maybe a little scary. My pals in the hunting fraternity might scoff at what I’m about to say but it truly is a stirring experience.
Snowball kept coming. At about 10 yards, close enough to see his face, he stopped and gave a snort. Deer do this when they see, hear, smell or sense something they don’t like. His partners followed suit, all snorting then hightailing it for cover. Snowball blew by me, whitetail held high. I held my breath. Only that big buck in the back row stayed put. He snorted twice more, pawed the ground hard enough for me to feel it, then turned and ran in the opposite direction.
Everyone has an opinion about hunting. Usually you’re either for it or staunchly against it. For me hunting isn’t always about pulling the trigger. Sometimes it’s about almost catching a snowball.

If I can do it, so can you

It took precisely 27 minutes from the time I asked until the time I was granted a blog of my own. Of course it helps if you have a technically-gifted friend like Ian McCausland who effortlessly granted my wish. I have officially taken the next step in my technophobic life. If I can do, you can too. Please stand by for The Fish Wrapper, the blogger version.

Shel Has a Blog Now!

Pretty sweet eh?
Shel, do what ever you want, you can't really break this. If you wish to add photos, make them a bit smaller, then when you create a post, you see that pic icon, click it and follow the instructions, it's easy!