Comment by incomingpain
3 months ago
No. For hundreds of years authors loved to use the em dash. It was a sign of quality writing. Only very recently has it stopped getting used and only because the - is on the wrong side of the keyboard and it's becoming more a hyphen instead.
When someone uses an em dash, it implies they arent using a normal keyboard; not even dvorak.
Even today it's common in professional writing (high quality articles, published books). I agree though that a typical modern keyboarder is going to use a dash or semicolon instead (if anything).
But MS word automatically converts a '-' to an emdash
But an emdash is incredibly easy to type on a Mac — it's shift+option+minus, or option+minus to type an endash
So maybe the training data has a lot of old English writing and overcoming the model's tendency to use em dashes everywhere with custom instructions would use up more electricity.