Can We Omit Suspended Hyphenation in These?

Can we forgo the ugly suspended hyphens in these? It looks so much cleaner and clearer to a reader than to have those dangling hyphens. Would you support it in professional writing? (I hope so!)

The movie appealed to five, six, and seven-year-olds. (Rather than: The movie appealed to five-, six-, and seven-year-olds.)

first, second, and third-grade activities
(Rather than: first-, second-, and third-grade activities)

two and four-wheel drive
(Rather than: two- and four-wheel drive)

fifteen and thirty-year mortgages
(Rather than: fifteen- and thirty-year mortgages)

pre and post-war
(Rather than: pre- and post war)

a one to two-week vacation
(Rather than: a one- to two-week vacation)

three, six, and nine-month updates
(Rather than: three-, six-, and nine-month updates)

open and closed-door policies
(Rather than: open- and closed-door policies)

long and short-term loans
(Rather than: long- and short-term loans)

But: “a ten percent-off coupon”
(The reader needs the single hyphen, I think, to fully grasp that the coupon is entitling the customer to ten percent savings off [deducted from] the original price

Thank you.

 

You can't omit them because that changes the meaning of the sentence. To use one of your examples, "fifteen and thirty-year mortgages" means you have one (or many) thirty-year mortgage(s) and fifteen other mortgages. The suspended hyphen makes it clear that you're talking about a fifteen-year mortgage.

 

No.

Punctuation isn't about looks. It's about sense and meaning.

 

A fun read, that will give you an appreciation for the need and usage of punctuation is, Lynn Truss's, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

 

I have a word combination like this metallo-porphyrins and -phthalocyanines which eventually gives a linebreak between the hyphen and the word phthalocyanines. I tried to include the ngerman package as described here. This works fine but messes up the quotes used in the text elsewhere (I used so far "word"). I know I could use ''word`` instead for having english quotes. However the suspended hyphen appears once in the text and the quotes several times in the document (several files). I would therefore prefere to use a different solution for the hyphen. If this is not possible and I have to change the quotes, then I still get the ugly bookmarks and would need an alternative to this solution.