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Well, Theresa's doing all that great big-picture thinking again, and here I am, worrying about hyphens. :)

But boy, this got to me, especially since it came from a publisher:
The End to End eBook Solution

I puzzled over that. Made me think of "The war to end wars," and Churchill's "This might be the end of the beginning." But that's not what it means, surely, that this product, whatever it is, is the END of something, that something being, I guess, the "End eBook," or maybe "End eBook Solution". But that's what it's saying. The End. And what is it the end to? End eBook Solution. It's sort of scary, isn't it, that somewhere out there is an "End eBook," the last eBook, maybe? Sounds apocalytic, and adding "solution" only makes it more resonant with finality.

Oh. That's not what it means. That can't be what it means. So what does it mean?

Read over your sentences. Read like a reader would read. Is the reader likely to know what you mean without having to read over and over and discard possible meanings and then, reluctantly, deciding that some meaning is maybe more plausible, given the context and common sense? It's your job to make your meaning clear, not the reader's job to figure out what the hell you're talking about.

Anticipate problems as you write sentences. For example, "end" is especially complicated because it can be a verb or a noun... or an adjective. And "to" similarly can play different roles, as a preposition or as part of a verb-infinitive. So "end to end" meaning from one end to another uses "to" as a preposition (positioning the two ends), while "the war to end wars" uses "to" as the beginning of the infinitive "to end". So, really, you almost couldn't choose a phrase more calculated to confuse.

Fortunately, there's something called a "hyphen" to help.

What goes with what? Don't make the reader guess. This is why hyphens were invented, to indicate when something is a compound, to be read together, usually as a modifier. So probably the compound is "end-to-end"? Like the two cars parked end to end? I'm not sure what it means in this context, and why it's not "beginning to end," but I do know that with hyphens, we know that "end-to-end" is a compound modifier, and while we still don't know if it modifies "eBook" or "solution" or (most likely) "eBook solution," we are at least in the ballpark of meaning and we're not thinking grim thoughts about the end of days and final solutions.

So the rule is:

Compound modifiers before the noun modified are hyphenated. (What's a compound, of course, is up to some debate. Some writers hyphenate "dark blue" before "sea"-- "dark-blue sea," and that's maybe overkill. :) Whether the compound is hyphenated when it's NOT before a noun (like "the solution was end to end/end-to-end") is more a case-by-case (g) determination.

Bring back sentence diagramming, that's what I say. If the person who wrote that advertising tag had spent fourth grade diagramming sentences, well, this travesty would not have happened. And somewhere up in heaven, Sister Evarista is smiling. (I might be presuming too much with that "heaven" thing-- ouch! Okay, okay. Sister Evarista must be in heaven, because that's where the thunderbolts of rebuke are launched.)

Sentence diagramming site (the author apparently had his own Sr. Evarista)

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