ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Chocolate-Covered Candies. Because sometimes

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you just need your sugar to be dipped in sugar.

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How should this sentence be changed so that it is grammatically correct?

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The chocolate-covered candies were hard-centered.

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Hyphens are used for more than just to communicate how important Hollywood bigwigs are.

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They are also used to combine compound modifiers, or words that modify the interpretation of

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a sentence's subject...as long as they come before that subject.

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Let's check out the use of hyphens in the original sentence.

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Chocolate-covered seems legit, but what about hard-centered?

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This one comes after the subject, so it doesn't work. Again - hyphens can only be used to

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combine modifiers that come before the subject. In D, the hyphen doesn't come between two

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compound modifiers, it comes between one of the compound modifiers and the subject.

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So, this one is outta there. C has the same problem as the original

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sentence. The hyphen can only be used in front of the noun to combine modifiers, but hard-centered

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is after the subject. And we're left with B. This uses a hyphen

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only between the words before the subject.

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These things sound delicious, but, of course, they'll still need to be deep-fried.

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