Any Writers here?

[Sakmeht]

Hello all,

I'm writing an article about egg-eating behavior in backyard flocks and am needing some help with hyphen usage. For example, I believe I correctly hyphenated "egg-eating" in the sentence I just wrote, right?

But what about these:

Egg Eating in the Backyard Flock (my title)

...have discovered what you believe to be egg eating in your flock

Egg eating is a learned behavior and...

...different ways to break the egg-eating habit.

I'm feeling more and more like the first three should be hyphenated. What do you think?

Thanks for any help - I know this isn't a writing forum

Sarita

 

[Whittni]

Usually you use hyphens with phrases like "twenty-one-year-old" because its just one thing. Since egg eating isn't really a word (more of a description) I don't think it matters whether you use the hyphen or not.