This Post Isn't About Superheroes

"Batman" is not hyphenated. "Spider-Man" is. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but there you are.

Who cares? Readers care. And writers should care that their readers care. Because even a reader who doesn't care at all about the whole superhero genre can look at a sentence with Bat-Man in it and say, "That looks wrong." In fact, it will look just as wrong as mixing up to, too, and two.

I chose Batman and Spider-Man because they are invented words that follow arbitrary rules. They aren't the only ones. Taser is a brand name and therefore capitalized. On the other hand, eBay capitalizes its second letter but not its first. And there are weird exceptions to the weird rules. Scuba and laser are both acronyms and by rights ought to be in all caps. But they have fallen so deeply into common use that SCUBA and LASER would look odd.

I understand that mistakes happen. I have found typos in professionally published novels by quality authors (including, alas, some of my own books). But my point here is that certain types of words require a little more attention to get right. And where a given typo may appear once in a manuscript, this type of error will occur every time you use the word.

So when in doubt about a brand, company name, acronym, or other odd or recently invented word, take the time to look it up.

Oh, and for the record, both "superheroes" and "super-heroes" appear in common use, along with the less frequent two word version: "super heroes." I know because I looked. Sometimes the research just confuses things. Sorry about that.