Holiday punctuation 9-1-1 received today: Oh, Guru of Grammar, I'm writing our holiday cards and I'm stumped. Should I use dashes or commas? "We've had a rockin'-awesome-crazy-wonderful-fantabulous-extraordinary-superb kind of year."
The answer in this example is to use commas. The dashes join a string of words or a whole phrase into a single word, for syntax/punctuation purposes. But you're just using a lot of modifiers as themselves...a string of modifiers. So, separate them with commas! The example I like to use is: She got that creepy, shivery, something's-under-the-bed feeling....
See how you have an example of both adjectives separated by commas and another set of words connected by hyphens to behave like another adjective in the list?
Note: Adjective = a word that describes (or modifies) a thing
The answer in this example is to use commas. The dashes join a string of words or a whole phrase into a single word, for syntax/punctuation purposes. But you're just using a lot of modifiers as themselves...a string of modifiers. So, separate them with commas! The example I like to use is: She got that creepy, shivery, something's-under-the-bed feeling....
See how you have an example of both adjectives separated by commas and another set of words connected by hyphens to behave like another adjective in the list?
Note: Adjective = a word that describes (or modifies) a thing
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