posted
And I thought I'd share becaure I rarely see novice writers doing this right.
I am referring to cases of compound adjectives. We all know what an adjective is, I am certain. Sometimes, though, adjectives are compound. So instead of having a single word modify a noun like "fitted jeans", you have more than one word modifying a noun like "loose-fitted jeans" these words are hyphenated. If not, loose and fitted will modify jeans indivudally, so you have loose jeans and you have fitted jeans, which is a bit of a contradiction in this case. Other examples, "seven-year-old boy", "smooth-talking jerk"...
There are a couple of exceptions. You do not hyphenate if the first word in the compound ends in -ly. "loosely fitted jeans". You also do not hyphenate if the adjectives are used after the noun. "The jeans are loose fitting." or "The boy was seven years old." And then, of course, there are the general complicated english things in which every rule just has an exception. Sometimes something is used so commonly that it just doesn't need hyphnation. For example, "junio high school."
So, that's what I wanted to share. I only discovered recently that this wasn an issue in my writing and I went about finding answers and this is what I found. I hope this helps someone else.
posted
When it comes to hyphenating words, I've usually been a play-it-by-ear kind of writer.
Fortunately, my ear agrees with the above-stated rules on a practical level, even if I might quibble about the theory. (For example, words ending in -ly are probably adverbs, not adjectives.)
posted
I don't think "junio[sic] high school" [ ] is an exception. In this case "high school" is a noun phrase by itself because it is, effectively, a name. So, "junior" is modifying "high school" rather than "junior high" modifying "school".
If you want to think about it at a lexical analysis kind of level, it's a "junior (high school)" rather than a "(junior high) school" which is what would be meant if you had a hyphen in there. It could also be a "junior (high (school))" which doesn't make a lot of sense, so we can safely ignore this possible meaning
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