Dear Geist,

You messed up the hyphens in your recent post Long Long Wind. In responding to Bob G's note about long sentences, you wrote: “when well crafted, well placed among other well-written passages...”

—Agata, Markham ON

Dear Agata,

We don't claim to be error-free—heck, we're human—but the punctuation here is correct. Well-written is a two-word adjective that modifies the noun passages. It is an “attributive adjective,” meaning an adjective that appears right before the noun it modifies. Because the adjective contains more than one word, its two words need to be connected with a hyphen to ensure that readers will instantly comprehend them as one adjective, modifying the noun.

As for “well crafted” and “well placed,” both are hyphen-free because they're “predicate adjectives”—they occur after the predicate and they modify the subject of the predicate, so they are easily read and comprehended without any linking hyphens or other clarifiers.

—The Editors