Jack Applin sends this in: “A hyphen between “you” and “know”? As in “you-know”? What sense does that make? If she will criticize his punctuation, then she should also condemn the excessive and random number of dots in his ellipses, though she is no better with her five-dot ellipsis.”
So she’s able to read thought balloons clearly enough to discern hyphens?
Comics I Don't Understand 
McEldowney does that a lot. His characters love to be pretentious about grammar but he personally struggles with it. He gets subjective and objective case wrong, punctuates like it’s decorative, and loses track of subject-verb agreement regularly. I’ve wondered for years if he just enjoys rage-baiting grammarians, legitimately believes he’s right, or is trying to write “informed pedantry” where the reader is expected to accept that the character is right for the sake of the story (as an example of an informed trait, think of Tony Stark – the audience accepts that he’s a genius engineer even though the actual things he says about science on screen are nonsense).