Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. (Some frequently asked questions are here.)

Hyphens can clarify a phrase and are sometimes crucial to the meaning. But if we sprinkle them heedlessly where they’re not called for, the effect is distracting at best and can be confusing.

A few unwanted hyphens in recent days:

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The nationwide poll is based on telephone interviews with 976 adults conducted May 31 through June 3 on landlines and cellphones and has a margin-of-sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

No hyphens wanted; here they actually distort the meaning. We don’t mean that the poll definitely has an error of three percentage points (with the hyphenated phrase describing what kind of error). We mean that there is a margin of three percentage points up or down, owing to potential sampling error.

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The request, which included seeking approval to train foreign internal security forces that had been off-limits to the American military, was the latest effort by the command’s top officer, Adm. William H. McRaven, to make it easier for his elite forces to respond faster to emerging threats and better enable allies to counter the same dangers.

As The Times’s stylebook says, no hyphen is called for unless this modifier is used before its noun.

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The $1.5-billion project was called Wfirst, for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

This one’s in the stylebook, too. No hyphen is needed when a million or billion figure is used as a modifier like this.

And Too Many Dashes

Used sparingly and carefully, the dash can be a helpful device. But as I’ve noted before, a profusion of dashes can be a sign of overstuffed sentences or convoluted prose. And when parentheses, colons and plenty of commas are added to the mix, well, it’s a mess. A couple of cautionary examples:

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WASHINGTON — As President Obama seeks re-election, he has one advantage that Bill Clinton did not have as president in 1996: a popular Democratic predecessor to vouch for him — Mr. Clinton. The former president had only Jimmy Carter, who remained a political pariah.

Yet in recent days Mr. Obama has learned — as Hillary Rodham Clinton did during her race against Mr. Obama for the 2008 Democratic nomination — that having Bill Clinton as your surrogate carries risks as well as rewards.

The man considered by Democrats and Republicans as the most skillful politician of his era proudly acts as his own speechwriter and strategist. And when Mr. Clinton is on his game, he is — as Mr. Obama said during their joint appearance at a Broadway fund-raiser on Monday — “as good at breaking down what’s at stake at any given moment’’ as anyone.

But at that same event, Mr. Clinton himself acknowledged, “I’m a little rusty at politics.” And when he hits a wrong note, it is amplified by a 24-7 cable-and-blogosphere megaphone unlike anything Mr. Clinton had to deal with in the 1990s, often drowning out his intended message.

So it was that his effusive praise for Mr. Obama at the three Manhattan fund-raisers on Monday, and his thorough dissection of the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, was all but lost amid the attention to Mr. Clinton’s off-message words in separate television interviews — one before Monday’s events, the other a day later.

A dash or dashes appear in four of the first five paragraphs of this story, with at least two more uses further down. None of them are wrong, but over all so many dashes produce a loose, ramshackle effect in the prose.

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Not surprisingly he had a magpie’s love of all sorts of literature — Poe, Shakespeare and Sherwood Anderson (whose “Winesburg, Ohio’’ reportedly inspired “The Martian Chronicles’’) as well as H. G. Wells and L. Frank Baum — and borrowed devices and conventions from the classics and from various genres.

The Russian-doll effect of parentheses within dashes makes for difficult reading.

In a Word

This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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So perhaps the only thing more surprising than Ms. Rivers’s role in her condominium is that this spicy doyenne of raunch and laughter, who will gladly make fun of race, terrorism, your backside or your mother, is deadly serious about her condo building, lobby furniture and all.

We use this word, and its male counterpart, “doyen,” with a frequency that verges on a tic. It means, simply, “the senior member of a group, especially one regarded as an authority,” but we seem to use it as a way to convey that someone is old.

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WASHINGTON — In an ornate room in the Capitol last Wednesday night, the Democratic senators who could hold the key to preventing a fiscal train wreck gathered for dinner and a talk with economists about their options for dealing with nearly $8 trillion in combined tax increases and spending cuts that are to be put in place automatically in January.

Why are there never any fiscal plane crashes? Adjective plus “train wreck” is a cliché.

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Could it get bogged down in the ponderous self-regard that sunk “Studio 60,” his short-lived NBC series where the inner offices of a sketch comedy show became an unlikely arena for debates about religious tolerance and the morality of paying ransom for hostages?

The preferred past tense is “sank.”

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She drew little attention, wearing drably colored clothes and no makeup. Neighbors said she avoided eye contact and kept to herself.

Why not just say the clothes were “drab”? The adjective means “not bright or lively; dull, dreary or monotonous” or “of a dull yellowish-brown color.”

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The suicide rate among the nation’s active-duty military personnel has spiked this year, eclipsing the number of troops dying in battle and on pace to set a record annual high since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan more than a decade ago, the Pentagon said Friday.

We seem to be comparing the number of suicides, not the suicide rate, to the number of combat deaths. Also, “eclipsing” doesn’t seem quite right here as a metaphor — “surpassing” would be better.

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Since April, conservative groups have had a near-continuous presence on television in battleground states, providing Mr. Romney with cover while his campaign remained off the air.

It would have been simpler and less of an exaggeration to say “continual,” meaning “over and over again,” rather than a “nearly unbroken” presence. There are some shows in between the ads.

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Told that contemporaneous accounts in The New York Times state otherwise (“The plea was part of an intricate arrangement with the Brooklyn district attorney,” the newspaper’s March 8, 1994, account states), Mr. Vecchione amended his statement.

Sequence of tenses requires a past tense verb here: “stated.”

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In a show of solidarity with Iran, its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting as an observer.

This sentence doesn’t really track. It reads as though Ahmadinejad is showing solidarity with Iran by attending. If we mean that the organization is showing solidarity with Iran, that noun should probably come after the introductory phrase. Perhaps: “In a show of solidarity with Iran, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization invited …”

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From time to time, Republicans call on President Obama not to take vacations or campaign fund-raising trips, and stay behind instead to hammer out legislative agreements.

Put down the hammer. Step away from the cliché.

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It took awhile for the after-hours business to take off, he said, but these days there are enough late-night customers to justify the expense.

In this construction we want the noun, “a while,” not the adverb, “awhile.”

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A self-described magician and escapist who once set a record for eating a household light bulb in fewer than 34 seconds was arrested and charged with committing a string of Brooklyn bank robberies, the police said Thursday.

Make it “less than 34 seconds.” The sense is of a duration of time, not an enumeration of individual seconds.

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The new organization would capture a huge swath of Manhattan, including some of its most affluent neighborhoods. It would be a formidable rival in the fight for patients and market share with the current behemoth among New York City hospital systems, New York-Presbyterian, which was created by a 1998 merger of what are now known as Columbia University and Weill Cornell Medical Centers.

“We don’t have any information or knowledge, so we really can’t speculate or comment on it,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for New York-Presbyterian, said of the proposed merger.

Alas, the official name of the hospital squishes the words together: NewYork. (It’s in the stylebook.)

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[Editorial] Republicans in Congress seem more determined not only to block any boost that President Obama wants to give the economy, but they are preparing to take the nation’s credit rating hostage again over the debt ceiling.

These elements are not parallel. Rephrase the sentence.

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TRENTON — A New Jersey Senate panel rejected on Thursday the second of two men nominated by Gov. Chris Christie to the state’s highest court, dealing another blow to the governor’s attempt to reshape what he has criticized as an overly liberal and activist institution.

If, as here, the time element can’t go after the direct object, put it before the verb — not between the verb and the object. Here’s what the stylebook says:

In fluid writing, the best place for the time element is after the verb — immediately after, if the verb has no direct object: The dean of Cordero University announced on Tuesday that undergraduates would be required to perform four hours of community service a week. But if there is a direct object, the object should immediately follow the verb, and the time element should ideally follow both: Mayor Leslie T. Baranek ordered the police on Tuesday to arrest jaywalkers.

When the direct object is long or cumbersome, the time element must come before the verb, though smoothness will usually suffer: Mayor Leslie T. Baranek on Tuesday ordered the police, already complaining of overwork and threatening a slowdown, to arrest jaywalkers.

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After Deadline examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times. It is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual.