Please use an em-dash—like this one—for parenthetical asides or for a gentler colon. Do not use spaced hyphens - like this - they are wrong.

I don’t know where this trend came from or how to stop it. I suspect

• Poor education for effective punctuation and grammar means fewer people know about the different kinds of dashes.
• Keyboard and editor interfaces hide away various typographic characters, including en- and em- dashes, making them less discoverable.
• In the twist of self-reinforcing trends, publicly visible uses make this mistake more acceptable.

I can’t top Butterick on explanations, so please review Hyphens and Dashes for the different kinds and uses. I’m going to mention some input methods he omitted:

• On an iPhone keyboard, holding the hyphen gives you options for dashes of different lengths, including en- and em- dashes.
• (Programmers) In Jekyll- or Kramdown- processed Markdown, the code --- becomes an em-dash and -- becomes an en-dash, thanks to Typewriter Habits. Note that they must appear within text not to be confused with the horizontal rule shorthand.
• (Programmers) In Vim, the digraphs -N and -M (enter with Ctrl+k) produce en- and em- dashes, respectively.

Collected examples

I accept submissions.

• A Foreteller Companion App post reads:

  • Growing concerns on regulations and legal ramifications - which trickle down into new policies to adhere to and shorter deadlines to implement, which puts our product development on hold
  • App Store presence doesn’t help our niche audience - while ASO is important in most industries, we have qualitative data that shows overwhelmingly our installs come from direct installs from links, QRs, conventions

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