The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), for example, has some good guidelines for line breaking, but, thankfully, Microsoft Word has an excellent built-in hyphenation tool.

If you later edit the preceding text and the word does not need to be split, the hyphen does not display.īut you do have to know the rules regrading where you can split the word, and, to me that’s not always obvious. Word only displays the hyphen if it’s needed to split the word over the end of a line. If this is obvious, you can manually insert an Optional Hyphen by pressing Ctrl and – together. However, the rules for where you can split any given word are confusing-to me at least, or maybe I was sick on the day they covered end-of-line hyphenation in English at school! According to the accepted convention, you must only break words at syllable boundaries. This is even more effective in multiple column layouts-let’s be honest, we can all read a fully-justified, hyphenated newspaper column with ease-and even in tables. If adding hyphenation at the end of a couple of lines in a paragraph can reduce the number of lines by only one, then that’s one line you’ve gained for more content. I appreciate that there may be those of you who are already using end-of-line hyphenation, and those of who are firmly opposed to using it under any circumstances but there is no doubt that it can save space in a page-limited proposal scenario. Here’s how to use them.īy Dick Eassom, CF APMP Fellow (aka Wordman) End-of-line hyphenation can save space, especially in page-limited proposals, and Microsoft Word has excellent hyphenation tools.

Automatic hyphenation word