Hi! What is the purpose of the hyphens? Thanks, Fulvio
1. in 2014, a seventeen – year – old girl won the Noble Peace Prize.
yellowstarstruck seventeen – year – old girl That's not the proper way to write hyphens. With hyphens you don't leave spaces. It's "seventeen-year-old girl".
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yellowstarstruckseventeen – year – old girl
That's not the proper way to write hyphens. With hyphens you don't leave spaces. It's "seventeen-year-old girl".
The purpose here is to keep all the words together that are part of the compound adjective.
Other examples:
ready-to-wear clothes; a cold-blooded killer; an open-minded professor
There are no spaces around hyphens. A sentence starts with a capital letter.
They are there to make one word out of the three-word adjective to help the reader who otherwise encounters a number, a noun and an adjective: In 2014, a seventeen year old girl won the Noble Peace Prize.
Anyway, it's just the way we write things like that. To do it some other way distracts the reader.