Comment by accoil

1 day ago

If it makes a difference: it's an en dash used in the readme.

I've been wondering why LLMs seem to prefer the em dash over en dash as I feel like en (or hyphen) is used more frequently in modern text.

2 comments

accoil

Reply
schrodinger  19 hours ago

In my experience the em dash is still correctly used, the modern style has just evolved to put a space around it.

So:

* fragment a—fragment b (em dash, no space) = traditional

* fragment a — fragment B (em dash with spaces) = modern

* fragment a -- fragment b (two hyphens) = acceptable sub when you can’t get a proper em to render

But en-dashes are for numeric ranges…

  • lxgr  15 hours ago

    em dash plus spaces is quite rare in English style guides. It’s usually either an em dash and no spaces or an en dash with them.