I hope that you saw the latest news here.

Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens, my new book valued by reader consensus at $19.97, is absolutely free here now! (Update: I subsequently replaced this with How to Use Hyphens.)

I know: I might be crazy to give it away, but I think that you are going to enjoy this product so much that you are going to decide to maybe be a customer of some of my other products in the future.

And one of my upcoming books is a version of Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens that will be specially formatted for the Amazon Kindle.

Having just gotten a Kindle 2, I am stoked about the way that the Kindle has revolutionized the way that people like you and me can find, buy, and read books.

That gets to my other reason why I am giving away Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens absolutely free.

You see, I want you to get the book, read it, and then let me know a fair price for the Kindle version of the book.

As a thank-you, I will then send you a $27 book titled Words to Profits.

But you have to start the ball rolling.

Request my hyphenation book today!

UPDATE: My How to Use Hyphens book is now available in softcover and several eBook editions. It replaces the Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens PDF. Learn more here!

I saw this last night on the Fox TV program “Hell’s Kitchen”.

Problem:
The subtitle editor split the word “tomorrow” in the wrong place when making it span two lines.

Explanation:
The TV program “Hell’s Kitchen” sometimes must display subtitles because the audio was poorly recorded or because the producers believe that an American audience will not understand chef Gordon Ramsay or one of the contestants in the program.

I do not recall the entire subtitle, but at one point during last night’s episode someone said a sentence that contained the word “tomorrow”.

If a sentence does not fit on one line in a subtitle, the subtitle editor must make the sentence run across two or more subtitle lines.

I put the vertical bar (|) in the title of this blog post to indicate that this is where the subtitle editor chose to split the word “tomorrow” such that the first part ended one line and the second part started the next line.

Because subtitles are added in post-production and are not the equivalent of closed captioning of a live event, the subtitle editor should have had time to compose each subtitle correctly.

So it seems to me that the editor did not know how to split the word “tomorrow” into two lines.

1. The editor split the word at the wrong letter.
2. The editor failed to include a hyphen at the end of the first part of the split word.

A dictionary tells the reader where to split any word, and a hyphen is always required at the end of the first part of the split word.

Solution:
“… to- | morrow …”

I saw this in a promotion.

Problem:
A hyphen is missing.

Explanation:
The promotion appeared in an FAQ for new lofts at the University of Houston.

Perhaps the promotion’s author should get my new hyphenation book!

The full sentence was “Included in your rent is the AT&T U-Verse 100 state-of-the art technology and it provides about 100 cable channels, including ABC, CBS, NBC, BET, CNN, CSPAN and many more. ” — with a space between “state-of-the” and “art”.

Because these two parts together modify the noun “technology”, the entire sequence of words — “state” plus “of” plus “the” plus “art” — should be hyphenated.

It makes no sense to talk about “art technology” that is “state-of-the”.

Solution:
“state-of-the-art technology”