Learn English – How to write “Stay up-to-date with notifications” or “Stay up to date with notifications”

grammar

Please help, how to write correctly "Stay up-to-date with notifications" or "Stay up to date with notifications".
To me it seems to be an adjective here, therefore I would choose "up-to-date".
Please explain.

Best Answer

There are typically two ways of styling a compound adjective:

  1. It uses up-to-date notifications.
  2. It uses notifications that are up to date.

When a compound adjective comes after a noun, it is not normally hyphenated because it's obvious that it's being used as an adjectival phrase.

In your case, up to date is not being used in an adjectival way to modify notifications. Instead, it is being used in an adverbial way to modify the verb stay.

This is similar to simply saying:

You need to stay up to date.

Or, to rephrase your example sentence to make the parsing more clear:

(Stay up to date) with notifications.

So, I would recommend not hyphenating.

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