Comment by oxguy3
10 hours ago
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.
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?
Not OP, but I find the space-en-space convention easier to read than the nospace-em-nospace convention. American style guides prefer the latter – in my eyes they are wrong about that
They're wrong about preferring the style you find easier to read?
Did you mean American style guides prefer the latter?
1 reply →
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.
That's because in Italian, like in many other European languages, you use en-dashes to separate parenthetical clauses. The en-dash is used with space, the em-dash (mostly) without space and that's why it's longer. On old typewriters they were frequently written as "--" and "---" respectively. So yes, it's mostly an English thing. Stick to your trattinos, they're nice!
It's a US thing
That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.
I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.
>That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.
Yes, that is more or less what "hot take" means.
agree. it implies a strong relationship between the two words it is inserted between - not the sentences.