As promised are resident Grammar Queen will answer and post grammar tips once a week. To get us started I asked her:

Dear Valerie Robertson, i.e. Grammar Queen,

Okay, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the use of hypthens.

The truck’s driver sat, knuckle white and red faced in the blue truck like a patriotic statue.

Is red faced really redfaced or red-faced? How about knuckle-white? Or am I over thinking this?

Amberly,

I think what you’re having difficulty with is compound adjectives. When two or more words modify a noun as a group (but not individually), then they need to be hyphenated. For example, “white-knuckled and red-faced furious,” where white-knuckled and red-faced both modify furious. Or you could go whole hog and write it as, “white-knuckled-and-red-faced furious.”

Of course, this _is_ English, so there are exceptions: If one of the modifiers is an adverb (the -ly endings are a dead giveaway), the compound adjective doesn’t need to be hyphenated.

There’s also a really obscure case that mostly applies to software manuals, but if one component of the compound adjective is itself a made up of more than one word, the multiword phrase isn’t hyphenated internally (these are usually command strings or program proper names). It just doesn’t come up much in fiction, but it’s in the Chicago Manual of Style.

The first example I could think of was “DDR SDRAM” which is a particular type of computer memory chip. So if you’re discussing a DDR SDRAM chip or a DDR SDRAM module (the actual thing you put in a computer to upgrade the memory), DDR SDRAM isn’t hyphenated, although it modifies the noun chip or module as a phrase.

The other time you would want to hyphenate a word is when you need to make a pronunciation differentiation: co-op vs. coop, or un-ionized vs unionized.

In your example, the word ‘white’ modifies ‘knuckled,’ so you don’t need a hyphen, and the word ‘red’ modifies ‘faced,’ also not needing a hyphen. To require hyphens, you need another word in there that both phrases modify/describe without the individual words in the phrases describing it.

Clear as mud?

Val,

Who could talk about this stuff all day long, because she’s just that sick and twisted…

Good thing Valerie is twisted. Post your grammar questions in the comments or send them to infocbc@yahoo.com attn: Grammar Queen and we’ll post the answers here.