Em dashes are fucking amazing

You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B).

Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.

I'm all for Unicode if you want to say something like 你好 but separate nearly similar characters, like the different kinds of dashes, feel somehow wasteful. I prefer to stick with ASCII.

Typesetting aside, the em-dash as a grammatical construct is indeed pretty great.

Since before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dataset of middlebrow American news blogs and similar sources. So I'm not surprised that the em dash has stuck out to people as such a prominent feature of its style. It definitely has its uses but I can't say I would mind at all if the controversy diminished its use in real writing.

Author failed to explain the dash universe and their semantic assignments.

- em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — <declaration>)

- en dash: expresses a range (1–100)

- dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley)

I'd also like to see more concise philosophy around em v. ellipsis, "limerance" is poetic (and ironically antithetical … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is prosaic.

I offer this feedback as a humorously offended fan of all sidecar prose pre-AI era.

Finally, I'd love to hear from this author regarding modern use of period in modern comunication, with canonical use-case of bulleted list as example.

One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted:

- − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative

- I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary

- × (multiplication symbol) for use in dimensions and when actually indicating multiplication

- ′ and ″ (single and double primes) for use when indicating feet and inches, or minutes and seconds

- it also made explicit the difference between º (ordinal o) and ° (degree symbol) and noted when to make use of the other ordinals

- … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces

- © ® ™ ℠ ℗ (copyright and so forth) to indicate such legal constructs as appropriate

- the various spaces en and em space, non-breaking flex space, &c.

I _think_ I still have a photocopy somewhere, but really should find a copy of the actual magazine....

The far more egregious and reprehensible thing is that many books now are published using quite pedestrian typing of the near equivalents from the keyboard as opposed to actually typing the correct signs.

I wrote a bit on this at:

https://tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf

(note that it intended to be printed, folded, cut in the center, then re-folded so as to make a "hot dog" booklet: https://www.makingbooks.com/hotdog.shtml )

EDIT: That said, folks should be sure to get:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41600.The_Mac_is_Not_a_T...

or

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358248.The_PC_is_Not_a_T...

Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash.

I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based).

(ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)

Nothing wrong with CMOS/APA/MLA dashes, I quite like them but usage in LLM prose has ruined it for me. AP dashes are weird, too much horizontal spacing, looks horrible and can really erode typographic color sometimes. "International" Oxford/Cambridge spaced dashes is nicest.

The funny thing is at both extremes, either none or indiscriminate use of dashes like in TFA, is a canary of "human writing".

People (including comments here) often attribute LLM use to prevalence in training data but it is probably far less common in the wild than we are led to believe, the more likely scenario is that whatever text-to-text normalization tools used ended up inserting whatever their idiosyncratic typographic styles were.

Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'

I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?

Troglodyte here... I never use em dashes, never use semicolons, overuse ellipses and commas.

AI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.

I did not know option + shift + hyphen produced an em dash. I've always used a double hyphen as a stand in -- as I did just now. LLMs don't do it and I haven't been accused yet. Though, more likely, I'm not popular enough for people to notice!

The overemphasis by critics on punctuation and "this not that" is tiring. I don't really know how to describe LLM writing but it has the same qualities as flat soda. Some authors you feel as though you fall through their work with little effort; unable to stop until gravity slams you into their conclusion. LLM writing can feel like an uphill hike to a sewage treatment plant. That is, its easy to convince yourself to stop at any time. There's a positive quality to that. I hope AI labs don't find a way to remove it.

One thing I've always loved about Apple's OSs is that they will render an em dash if you press-and-hold the hyphen key.

Great accessibility.

> ...on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

Fedora with XFCE here, but last I checked on Windows, it worked exactly the same over there: With a Chinese IME installed, tap shift to switch input language, shift+hyphen produces a double em-dash: ——, likewise, shift+6 a double elipsis: ……

You encounter those a lot in simple, machine translated Chinese, along with literal translations of "not X but Y", "not just ... but also" and similar sentence constructs that are common in Chinese. I suspect that's how a disproportionate amount of that ended up in training material in the first place.

Four words: Comic Sans Em Dashes!

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole

I never see emdashes squeezed tightly to the word before them.

I only ever see them with an AP-style spacing before and after.

This post is so self-consciously dependent on inserting em dashes everywhere that it kinda supports its own counterargument. If you're going to make a case for em dashes enabling more fluid writing and more distinctive voice, then you ought to actually use them that way.

I really don't get liking em dashes. Just use two sentences or modify your original one. Both options are clearer like 90% of the time.

I didn't know that AP style recommended spaces either side of the em dash. Here in the UK we generally use en dashes instead, and I thought em dashes always had no spaces. Apparently the wire machines that AP sent their news out by in olden times couldn't always do en dashes.

I get it. But I never would have until I built muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut.

writes an anodyne wall of text about his obsession with particular elements in a character table - ends with:

PS: if you want personalised advice from me on how to use punctuation correctly, you can now get it for $175/hour.

humans sometimes ...

ps: sasha, if you want me to read your future regurgitations you can now get that for €175/minute (limited availability, only skimread mode for now)

LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.

> Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes?

Some people even take pride on being able to detect (often falsely) AI generated work.

i typically enjoy a good profanity-laden rant, but something about this particular one feels very forced. this sentence, for example: "[...] What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.". i cant really put my finger on why, but it almost feels like the author wrote their rant, then came back afterwards with a quota of fuck/shit/bitch they wanted to meet, placing them wherever they could.

in any case, i mostly agree with the author that ai has co-opted too many things to be concerned about it anymore. i remember being linked a list of "1,000 words not to use" because ai used them a lot (e.g. "delve", "absolutely", etc.) and the venn diagram with the 1,000 most common english words was practically a circle. you would be unintelligible if you rigorously avoided them all. now i just write without care of my ai-similarity score.

and here i thought "option -" was an em-dash, but no, it's an _en_-dash.

Why the hell did they bury this thing three key-presses down on any keyboard???

I do indeed mis-using dashes.

Spaced en dashes are far more common internationally. Em dashes are primarily a US American tradition.

I also love them - makes spotting AI written content easier. People debated implementing complex algorithms how to watermark AI content - but luckily AI just settled on it by itself.

(sorry for a bit of gaslighting)

> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think?

If I'm writing something, typically I want to share my thoughts with other people and get their feedback. It won't work if they dismiss my writing because of some superficial stylistic choice, without even trying to engage with the ideas that I'm trying to express.

I've used dashes in typeset works ever since I learnt how to do them in (La)TeX (---). You don't usually put spaces around them, though.

There are actually four different "dash" type things in TeX: a hyphen, an en dash (for ranges like "10--20 pages"), em dash (---), and the minus symbol ($-$).

iOS settings-> general->keyboard

Turn off smart punctuation.

Saves bytes.

> “But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.

Hell yes, and ROFL. I’m tired of em dashes being cited as evidence of AI.

I feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters.

When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing?

It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself.

In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on

It's interesting that an article extoling the virtues of the em-dash isn't using them correctly. They don't get spaces around them.

I still use them unapologetically. I don't give a shit about your AI purity tests, thank you.

The economy may collapse and the job market rendered irreparable but the real victims of the AI boom are the em-dash and the sparkle emoji