How to Create Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes in Google Docs

Standard keyboards don’t have dedicated keys for special punctuation marks, such as an en or em dash, if you want to use them in Google Docs. Here’s how you can create hyphens and dashes in your documents.

As we are a technology website, we won’t go into detail about when and how to use each form of punctuation. Instead, you can check out what a hyphen, en dash, and em dash are if you’re unsure when to use each punctuation mark. Essentially, a hyphen is a dash (-), an en dash is the length of two dashes (–), and an em dash is the length of three dashes (—).

Manually Create Hyphens and Dashes

The first thing you’ll need to do is fire up your browser and open a Google Docs file to get started.

A hyphen is the easiest punctuation mark to create in Google Docs. Likely, your keyboard already has a key just for this purpose. Depending on the layout of the keyboard, the hyphen key is at the top and beside the zero (0) key. All you have to do is press it, and that’s it. Hyphen created.

En and em dashes are a little more tricky to find. Keyboards don’t have keys that are dedicated to these punctuation marks. Unless you’re a professional writer, you probably aren’t going to be using them that often.

Although you could enter the corresponding Alt key code for either en or em dash, you have an easier way to insert them into your document. Docs has a Special Characters tool that lets you add them without having to remember their codes.

Click on your document where you want to insert the dash, open the “Insert” menu, and then click “Special Characters.”

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via: howtogeek.com