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ruby course, project management: fix grammatically incorrect uses of a hyphen (-) #29602

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@Kezy-d4 Kezy-d4 commented Apr 9, 2025

Because

Please refer to this excerpt from Grammarly's article titled How to Use a Dash Correctly: En Dash vs. Em Dash:

What’s the difference between a dash and a hyphen?
A dash, which is longer than a hyphen, is used to indicate ranges, pauses, or emphasis, with common types being the en dash (–) for ranges and the em dash (—) for breaks or emphasis. A hyphen (-) is shorter and primarily used to join words or parts of words, such as in compound terms or prefixes.

Thus, according to the above definition, this PR replaces any grammatically incorrect use of a hyphen (-) throughout the lesson with an em dash (—) to better indicate breaks and emphasis. However, any grammatically correct use of a hyphen (-), as well as any use necessary for links, code and bullet lists have been maintained.

As for en dashes (–), there were none originally anywhere in the lesson, nor is there any need for one.

This PR

Please refer to the diff in order to review the specific changes. I suggest making use of your browser's "find" feature (CTRL/Cmd + F) which should make it easier to differentiate between the hyphens (-) and em dashes (—).

Issue

Closes #XXXXX

Additional Information

I've done my best to thoroughly review the lesson and my changes, but please point out any mistakes!

Pull Request Requirements

  • I have thoroughly read and understand The Odin Project curriculum contributing guide
  • The title of this PR follows the location of change: brief description of change format, e.g. Intro to HTML and CSS lesson: Fix link text
  • The Because section summarizes the reason for this PR
  • The This PR section has a bullet point list describing the changes in this PR
  • If this PR addresses an open issue, it is linked in the Issue section
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@github-actions github-actions bot added the Content: Ruby Involves the Ruby course label Apr 9, 2025
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I'll have to give this a bit of thought. A couple things that are on my mind:

  1. I agree that writing these as em dashes is correct--at least if they're going to be dashes.
  2. The curriculum currently only has a few other instances of em dashes, and there also don't seem to be many hyphens as punctuation in this type of context. This makes me a bit inclined to just rewrite these instances in this lesson with different punctuation and avoid the use of em dash at all.
  3. But if we do write this with em dash, they are almost always written without spaces on either end of the dash, and your changes still include that spacing.

But yeah I'll think about this some. Feel free to leave any thoughts you may have about any of the points I raised.

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Kezy-d4 commented Apr 9, 2025

Hi, thanks for reviewing. You raise some fair points. I'm not sure which approach would be best.

If we decide to rewrite those areas, I think it's probably best if someone more experienced and knowledgeable in Ruby tackles that just to make sure no crucial detail or info is lost in the translation, but let me know what you think.

Looking at the writing of the lesson, I get the impression that while some sentences might be translated by simply using some alternative punctuation in place of the dash and moving some words around, other sentences, and possibly the sentences around them, would need to be completely rewritten.

On the other hand, if we decide to keep the em dashes, I'd be happy to go ahead and remove the spacing around them as you mentioned.

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Kezy-d4 commented Apr 14, 2025

Something else has just become apparent to me. I have actually noticed occurrences of hyphens being used incorrectly throughout some other lessons in the Ruby course, and it may be the case elsewhere in the curriculum as well. Whichever solution we'd go for, I could see why you would want to apply that solution across the board for the sake of consistency, rather than on just one specific lesson. The problem is, that might prove to be a fairly gargantuan task, much larger than was anticipated or considered when making the changes for this lesson in isolation.

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