Following Well-Established Rules
In English, as in Law, there are accepted ways of doing things. If you deal in both subjects (English and Law), you should find out what those accepted ways are, and then adhere to them (unless you have one heck of a good reason for deviating from them).
Consider the following intro to this client alert:
Six federal agencies have jointly issued final rules imposing identity theft-related requirements on financial institutions, creditors, credit and debit card issuers, and users of consumer credit reports (the “Rules”).
What’s out of kilter is the hyphen in identity theft-related requirements (as well as the placement of (the “Rules”) and the lack of hyphens in credit- and debit-card issuers).
How should the phrase identity theft-related requirements be set? One good way to answer that question is to see what a reference like the Chicago Manual of Style has to say about it.
A phrasal adjective (also called a compound modifier) is a phrase that functions as a unit to modify a noun. A phrasal adjective follows these basic rules: (1) Generally, if it is placed before a noun, you should hyphenate the phrase to avoid misdirecting the reader {dog-eat-dog competition}. . . . (6) If a phrasal adjective becomes awkward, the sentence should probably be recast.
The production editor of this alert (if you publish alerts, you do run them by a production editor before they’re published, right?) shouldn’t have missed this one at all, especially since the alert makes repeated reference to an “Identity Theft Prevention Program.”
What he or she should have done is follow the Manual’s advice to recast the sentence, perhaps like so:
Six federal agencies jointly issued final rules (the “Rules”) imposing requirements on financial institutions, creditors, credit- and debit-card issuers, and users of consumer credit reports to identify possible instances of identity theft.
15 January 2008 at 13:04
Mister,
What’s your position on “credit- and debit-card issuers” and “consumer-credit reports”?
-wayne
15 January 2008 at 13:28
My position? My position is that a publisher (such as a law firm) should settle on a good style guide and then follow it.
If we use the Chicago Manual as a reference, your first example uses hyphens correctly, but your second example does not.
I can tell you one place where most law firms don’t use hyphens when they should: to break lines in justified copy. For some reason, they just don’t like to do that.
4 June 2008 at 8:16
Actually, they should have used a hyphen between “identity” and “theft” and an en-dash between “theft” and related. This means that the phrase identity-theft (a phrasal adjective) modifies related.