Many Right Touch Editing clients use the term cost-effective in their marketing collateral, including the variation cost effectively, as in: We are cost effectively providing.
A client once asked: “Should cost effectively be hyphenated? Cost-effective is hyphenated in Merriam-Webster’s, but I keep bumping into the rule about not hyphenating –ly adverbs in my grammar and style books.”
Compound adjectives like cost-effective are hyphenated, but compound adverbs with –ly adverbs generally are not. However, this rule only applies when the –ly adverb is the first word in the compound. For example:
We cost-effectively provide services.
Our recently added services are available for a free trial.
In section 7.86, The Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS) provides an exhaustive table of compound types and whether they take hyphens. Most compound modifiers take a hyphen before the noun. This signals to the reader that the two words are working as one, so that most-skilled workers (workers with the most skill) does not mean the same as most skilled workers (almost all of the skilled workers).
At some point, though, American English speakers collectively decided that we didn’t need to hyphenate compound modifiers that started with an –ly adverb. CMoS 7.93 advises not hyphenating in this case, because “ambiguity is virtually impossible.”
This is just one of the many nuances that editors must navigate in our field. For more on grammar and punctuation check out The Writing Resource. And for helpful editing resources including templates, webinars and business advice, visit our Editor’s Resource Library.
A version of this article originally published in the February–March 2016 issue of Copyediting newsletter.
