Comment by makingstuffs
10 hours ago
Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.
Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious.
And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.
Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”
It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?
If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
Also on phones it is really easy to use em dashes. It's quite out in the open whether I posted from desktop or phone because the use of "---" vs "—" is the dead give-away.
I configured my system to treat caps lock as compose, and also set up a bunch of custom compose sequences that better suit how I think about the fancy characters I most often want to type. My em-dash is `Compose m d`.
How do you find yourself using en dashes more than em dashes?
For me I use en dashes a lot for ranges like 1–N
Maybe they write out a lot of ranges?
Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.
I don't know if my language grammar rules (Italian) are different than English, but I've always seen spaces before and after em-dashes. I don't like the em-dash being stuck to two unrelated words.
2 replies →
That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.
I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.
1 reply →
agree. it implies a strong relationship between the two words it is inserted between - not the sentences.
As a brit I'd say we tend to use "en-dashes", slightly shorter versions - so more similar to a hyphen and so often typed like that - with spaces either side.
I never saw em-dashes—the longer version with no space—outside of published books and now AI.
There are British style manuals (e.g., the Guardian’s) that prefer em-dashes for roughly the same set of uses they tend to perferred for in US style guides, but it is mixed between em-dashes and en-dashes (both usually set open), while all the influential American style guides prefer em-dashes (but split, for digressive/parenthetical use, between setting them closed [e.g., Chicago Manual] and open [e.g., AP Style].)
The en-dash is also highly worthy!
Just to say, though, we em-dashers do have pre-GPT receipts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673869
Besides the LaTeX use, on Linux if you have gone into your keyboard options and configured a rarely-used key to be your Compose key (I like to use the "menu" key for this purpose, or right Alt if on a keyboard with no "menu" key), you can type Compose sequences as follows (note how they closely resemble the LaTeX -- or --- sequences):
Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period: produces – (en dash) Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen: produces — (em dash)
And many other useful sequences too, like Compose, lowercase o, lowercase o to produce the ° (degree) symbol. If you're running Linux, look into your keyboard settings and dig into the advanced settings until you find the Compose key, it's super handy.
P.S. If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.
> If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.
There are compose key implementations for Windows, too.
I think that's just incorrect. There are varying conventions for spaces vs no spaces around em dashes, but all English manuals of style confine to en dashes just to things like "0–10" and "Louisville–Calgary" — at least to my knowledge.
The Oxford style guide page 18 https://www.ox.ac.uk/public-affairs/style-guide
> m-dash (—)
> Do not use; use an n-dash instead.
> n-dash (–)
> Use in a pair in place of round brackets or commas, surrounded by spaces.
Remember I'm specifically speaking about british english.
1 reply →
It's also easy to get them in LaTeX: just type --- and they will appear as an em-dash in your output.
Came here to confirm this. I grew up learning BrE and indeed in BrE, we were taught to use en-dash. I don't think we were ever taught em-dash at all. My first encounter with em-dash was with LaTeX's '---' as an adult.
I would add that a lot of us who were born or grew up in the UK are quite comfortable saying stuff like "you're right, but...", or even "I agree with you, but...". The British politeness thing, presumably.
0-24 in the UK, 24-62 in the USA, am now comfortable saying "I could be wrong, but I doubt it" quite a lot of the time :)
Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.
The thing with em-dashes is not the em-dash itself. I use em-dashes, because when I started to blog, I was curious about improving my English writing skills (English is not my native language, and although I have learned English in school, most of my English is coming from playing RPGs and watching movies in English).
According to what I know, the correct way to use em-dash is to not surround it by spaces, so words look connected like--this. And indeed, when I started to use em-dashes in my blog(s), that's how I did it. But I found it rather ugly, so I started to put spaces around it. And there were periods where I stopped using em-dash all together.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you write as a profession, most people are inconsistent. Sometimes, I use em-dashes. Sometimes I don't. In some cases I capitalize my words where needed, and sometimes not, depending on how in a hurry I am, or whether I type from a phone (which does a lot of heaving lifting for me).
If you see someone who consistently uses the "proper" grammar in every single post on the internet, it might be a sign that they use AI.
Also, I've seen people edit, one-by-one, each m-dash. And then they copy-paste the entire LLM output, thinking it looks less AI-like or something.
Oof. I don't know what's worse there: that they don't know a conventional way to find-and-replace, or that they didn't try asking the LLM not to use them. (Or to fix it afterwards.)
Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.
Em-dashes are easy to type on a macos laptop for what it's worth: option-shift-minus.
Also on Linux when you enable the compose key: alt-dash-dash-dash (--- → —) and for the en-dash: alt-dash-dash-dot (--. → –)
That's not as easy as just hitting the hyphen key, nor are most people going to be aware that even exists. I think it's fair to say that the hyphen is far easier to use than an em dash.
But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down?
You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.
No. En-dash doesn't work "just as well" as an em-dash, anymore than a comma works as an apostrophe. They are different punctuation marks.
Also, I was a curmudgeon with strong opinions about punctuation before ChatGPT—heck, even before the internet. And I can produce witnesses.
4 replies →
When that baseline erodes, even normal human quirks start looking suspicious
I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about this thread. I have it top of mind because I participated and was extremely frustrated about, not just the AI slop, but how much the author claimed not to use AI when they obviously used it.
You can read it yourself if you'd like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46589386
It was not just the em dashes and the "absolutely right!" It was everything together, including the robotic clarifying question at the end of their comments.
Did you paste the wrong link? While the OP of that thread was accussed of using LLMs, the thread doesn't contain all of the specific tells mentioned in the article.
I think this one is a much closer fit to what the article describes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308
Well the dialogue there involves two or more people, when commenting, why would you use that.. Even if you have collaborators, you wouldn't very likely be discussing stuff through code comments..
You’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!
No problem! But it's also important to consider your image online. Here are some reasons not to use em-dashes in Internet forum posts:
* **Veneer of authenticity**: because of the difficulty of typing em-dashes in typical form-submission environments, many human posters tend to forgo them.
* **Social pressure**: even if you take strides to make em-dashes easier to type, including them can have negative repercussions. A large fraction of human audiences have internalized a heuristic that "em-dash == LLM" (which could perhaps be dubbed the "LLM-dash hypothesis"). Using em-dashes may risk false accusations, degradation of community trust, and long-winded meta discussion.
* **Unicode support**: some older forums may struggle with encoding for characters beyond the standard US-ASCII range, leading to [mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake).
If you want next, I can:
- Tell you what makes em dashes appealing.
- Help you use em dashes more.
- Give you other grammatical quirks smart people have.
Just tell me.
(If bots RP as humans, it’s only natural we start RP as bots. And yes, I did use a curly quote there.)
found the LLM bot guys!