Comment by avgcorrection
3 years ago
> This is way too much pedantry and hyper-hyphen-focus. Honestly, I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will. They add nothing to anyone's communications.
You have definitely seen them. All professional writing outlets, like e.g. the New York Times, use em-dashes, curly quotes, and other “typographic” characters that one is supposed to use in American English.
And newspapers in my own country follow the typographical rules. Even though no one uses it in informal communication on HN or FB. (Well, some on HN do.)
Except, I didn't write I hadn't seen them. "I've never seen them in business or personal writing".
We can discuss that I chose the word "seen", when I meant "noticed", but there is no doubt that I didn't write what you intimated. I have seen the dashes in formal writing and in newspapers.
A too-hurried reading is worse than not reading at all.
Oh. So “business” does not encompass “professional writing”. Good to know.
And also not “formal writing”.
And presumably no copy-pasted message from Word or whatever other app inserts “smart”-whatever automatically.
And also not any regular old business website. (Did you think newspapers were the only ones? Just because those were the examples?)
Even for personal writing: some people even take the time to insert bullet points, so “proper” punctuation is easy for them.
You’re a fine one to complain about pedantry. (I guess yours is a just-right level of (cover your ass) pedantry.)
I was pointing out that I don't see them in my day to day activities.
You've added exactly nothing to this discussion, just written a personal attack founded on misunderstanding and make-believe.