User:Kate Robinson/sandbox

Hyphenating multiple adjectives is, I argue, helpful to readers. For one thing, read any group of words that include multiple adjectives and a noun aloud and normally you can hear yourself coupling the adjectives, which is your brain clarifying which words belong together to convey meaning clearly. In the following sentence, it makes sense to hyphenate the modifiers since the brain is ‘saying’ they go together and the text is not cooperating with the reader’s brain without the hyphen: “Among them was also one of the first thinkers to go by the name of "liberal", the Edinburgh University−educated Swiss Protestant, Benjamin Constant.” Some would, I expect, hyphenate “Swiss Protestant,” but that seems a bit much in this case.

While in this case the hyphen simply groups modifiers for smoother reading, in other cases I’d argue that using the hyphen is much more important, as it’s the only way to make meaning clear at a glance.