Do you dash and hypen correctly?  

i very rarely use either of them, maybe i should start too

I am quite encouraged by your interest in grammar. It is such an important part of the English language.

Here is a way to know how to use the hypen or dash and when.

Go to www.grammarbook.com/english_rules.asp

Under the heading "Punctuation Rules,"
click on "spacing and punctuation"

Under Rule 2,
click on "dashes" for more information. It seems to be very well written. Enjoy!

I use em dashes fairly frequently, and I always leave spaces before and after them. I'm aware this is incorrect, but putting the em dashes right up agaist the adjoining words can create an eyesore, especially on the internet which treats the two em-dash-joined words as a single word. If both words are fairly long, you might get a line with a long white space at the end that looks like the end of a paragraph. If the column width is narrow, this can look positively weird. So I break this rule deliberately and hope that enough other people also break the rule so that eventually the rule will be changed.

I don't really care much about dash and hypen in my grammar.
When I write, I'm careless. As long that I can get my message
across. Then I'm fine with it.