Hyphens to Avoid Ambiguity - Worksheet

Hyphens are an essential tool in English writing, often used to avoid ambiguity and create clarity. In a series of worksheets, students are invited to explore the use of hyphens in various contexts. The first worksheet tasks students with identifying hyphenated words within sentences. These hyphenated words, such as 'father-in-law' and 'long-haired', serve to link words together to form compound nouns or adjectives, indicating a close relationship between the words that might otherwise be misunderstood if written separately.

The subsequent worksheets delve deeper into the function of hyphens. One worksheet challenges students to categorise hyphenated words into groups such as compound nouns, compound adjectives, numbers, and words with prefixes. Another encourages students to transform phrases into more concise hyphenated versions, enhancing their understanding of how hyphens can create compound descriptors, like turning 'a boy who is crazy about cricket' into 'a cricket-crazy boy'. The final worksheet presents sentences with bolded phrases that, when hyphenated, alter the meaning of the sentence entirely—for instance, 'man eating tiger' becomes 'man-eating tiger', changing the subject from a man who is eating to a tiger that preys on humans. These exercises not only test students' comprehension of hyphen usage but also illustrate the power of punctuation in shaping the meaning of text.