Who's afraid of the little old hyphen? Apparently a lot of folks. It's strange, but the tiny little hyphen seems to make grown men quake in terror. They harbor deep-seated notions that hyphens are bad...clutter up the place...are "bad form." The result is they simply don't deal with them. No hyphens, no problem.
If you suffer from hyphenphobia, let me rescue you from your false notions. You'll love the little critters when you learn when and where to use them to make your writings easier to read. Take, for instance, the following sentence. What's wrong with it?
"It was a state of the art, not a run of the mill design."
Wouldn't you rather read:
"It was a state-of-the-art, not a run-of-the-mill design."
The rule invoked here is that when two or more words are used as a compound adjective, they must be brought together as a single unit with hyphens. This is true of any two- or three-word groupings whose meaning as a modifier necessarily involves their use together. Example: "He used a four-letter word." Neither four nor letter could be used without the other to express the correct meaning. You wouldn't say "...a four word" or "...a letter word." No, the only way to let the reader quickly grasp the meaning is to group the two words together with a hyphen, because they comprise a single adjective.
The same is true of adjectives such as four-foot, two-thirds, six-dollar, easy-to-use, hard-to-handle, ready-made, and long-suffering
I hope I won't confuse you when I mention that there is one exception to this rule: When the first word of a compound modifier is an adverb ending in -ly, the hyphen is omitted. Examples: highly suspicious act, freely given affection, wholly accurate description.
Fortunately, you don't often have to make a decision about hyphenating a word at the end of a line of text, because today's editing programs do a pretty good job of hyphenating for this purpose. If you must make a decision, your dictionary has a ready answer for you. And you can always override the word processing program's hyphenating choices.
You can even tell the program not to hyphenate at all. Most sophisticated word processing programs allow you to prevent a hyphenated compound word or phrase from breaking at the end of a line by using a nonbreaking hyphen. For example, you might use nonbreaking hyphens to keep "forget-me-not" on the same line. Or you can use optional hyphens that say, "If you must break this word, do it here." (Check Microsoft Word’s Help files for instructions on the use of non-breaking and optional hyphens.)
As you struggle against your natural aversion to hyphens, just repeat over and over, "Hyphens are our friends; hyphens are wonderful little helpers."
Soon you'll be peppering your documents with hyphens just like the pros.