Grammar Rules for Maximum Consecutive Hyphenated Lines
Printed matter -- in books, magazines or newspapers -- must be factually accurate and grammatically correct. It should also be easy on the eye. Printers, who set words into type, and proofreaders, who double-check the printers' work, have developed guidelines for making those endless columns of ink spots as visually attractive as space permits. One guideline says that when words must be broken, or hyphenated, at the ends of printed lines, no more than three such broken lines in a row should appear.
Other People Are Reading
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Printing Basics
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Most languages are written, read and printed left to right, top to bottom. The reader's eyes and head move left to right, pausing briefly at each break -- the end of the line -- then drop down and move back. Much printed matter is set fully justified. That means each line of words fills out each printed line, left, right and center, as fully as possible.
Ladder of Failure
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If every word were the same length, the printer's and proofreader's lives would be much simplified, but writers love their polysyllabic children, their multiple-compound-modifier pileups and their rat-a-tat-tat expressions. The big words, in other words, must be broken up with hyphens at the ends of typeset justified lines to fit neatly on the printed page. More than three such broken-up lines in a row, and the reader's eye is pulled down along the railroad-track of hyphens, dropping off like "Chutes and Ladders" at the wrong point in the narrative. Such pileups of line-ending hyphens are called "ladders" by printers and proofreaders, and a "hyphen stack" by the authoritative Chicago Manual of Style of the University of Chicago Press.
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Them's the Breaks
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Hyphens are not the printer's only tools for cluing in the reader's eye to the relationship between words or parts of words. Printers use dashes, too, sometimes to separate words, sometimes to connect parts of words. For instance, an em dash may be employed to indicate a dramatic pause in a sentence -- like this! Half an em is called an en, so an en dash is half as long as an em dash. The en dash is often used in scientific notation to link up numbers and Latinisms in long chemical names. The hyphen, which connects compound words ("much-derided") and shows where the syllables break at the ends of lines ("mem-o-ra-bil-ia"), is shorter than both em dashes and en dashes. Just as printers and proofreaders don't want ladders of hyphens in print, they don't want ladders of em dashes or en dashes, or all three, either.
Solutions
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There's no "law" of grammar or printing that typeset lines be set fully justified; they can be set ragged right, meaning the last word to fit the line ends where it ends, and the next, too-wide word is carried over to the next line. It's like the word-wrap feature on your computer's word-processing program. Compound words can be broken up for a better fit. A few writers have even learned that readers prefer short words to long ones. Finally, the space between letters, or between words, or the actual size of the type, can be fudged a bit to shoehorn in an extra letter or two, if that's what it takes to keep the last word on the line from breaking.
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References
Resources
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