Follow these guidelines to use special characters correctly. It will make your documents easier to read and give you more credibltiy.

• The hyphen, often mislabeled a dash, is often misused. A hyphen (-) connects words together, an en (–) dash replaces the words "to" or "through," and an em (—) dash represents a pause. An en dash is roughly the length of an upper case N, and an em dash is the length of an upper case M.

• The inch mark ("), quotation mark ("), foot mark ('), and apostrophe (') have different meanings. Inch marks and footmarks are straight, quotation marks and apostrophes are curved.

• Ellipses ( . . .) are the three dots indicating excerpts of text or omission of words. The ellipses the computer makes (...) are too compressed. They look better if you use a space before and after each dot.

Make a good impression with error-free documents. Correct use of special characters will increase the readability of your documents and build more trust for your products and services.