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Friday, November 21, 2008

Criminal Sentence 131: Big name or big store?

From something I recently edited:

"The big name stores don’t attract the same people."

As I noted in the title of this post, are we talking about a big name or a big store? A hyphen will clarify things: "big-name stores."

If you have two words that modify one thing, then a hyphen helps link them:

high-wire act
low-maintenance haircut
well-written sentence

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