Comment by Drupon
2 days ago
An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
2 days ago
An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
First sentence:
> In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had.
The em-dash matches how you'd speak out loud.
You'd say "I take two classes every Tuesday back to back, boxing and 'body sculpt'. Weird name." (Parts of that sentence did flow oddly, but not because of the em-dash).
Grammarians say you can't make those separate sentences without adding some extra words, and because of blah-de-blah-blah-blah, someone might say you can't join them with a comma. So we have an em-dash.
Rewriting the sentence would make it flow less naturally, not more.
This is why I find using speech-to-text tools quite difficult to use: because the parts of my brain that I use for writing and the parts of my brain I use for speaking are a little different — although with significant overlap.
With writing I find I'm drafting the flow for readability and clarity as I'm writing, so I go back and rework bits and pieces — sometimes even while I'm in the middle to typing a sentence. Maybe it's because I write code for a living.
Speech only moves forward and you have to state your retractions or clarifications on the go. You can't go back and edit what you've said.
I've been trying to use speech-to-text a bit to: a) give my hands a bit of a break when I'm writing prose, and b) see if it's faster than typing.
I find there are long pauses while I'm struggling to draft what I'm going to say to what I want written, so I'm not sure if it is faster (given that I'm a ten finger touch typist so can type pretty fast is short bursts, and the time spent going back and tidying up the output which is somewhat tedious). It might improve with more practice.
— No tokens were harmed in the production of this comment. —
If I had a nickel for every em-dash I saw that could’ve been a colon…
You'd be full of shit.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said colon…
When I write like I talk, I use a lot of commas. Replacing some of my commas with em dashies, so long as it was done judiciously, would probably make things easier to chunk.
I’ve seen people use colons where em dashes are effective. I use em dashes. AI leans heavily on them for same reason
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Good writing shouldn't just be how you talk out loud.
Good writing doesn’t exclude it.
I wish more people had casual exposure to professional translators. Its a deeply important, vanishingly small segment of the human population and has been this way for at least many thousands of years. Also, it will continue to be!
I’ve a friend who does simultaneous interpretation at the UN and she’s just… good god, how do you even do that. Oh, and she does it in six languages.
And here I am, brain the size of a galaxy, and I fumble my way through every language I speak other than English.
Serious respect for the linguists.
I guess I should have figured Marvin would be here on HN, feeling sorry for himself.
> brain the size of a galaxy
Wow, aren't you humble.
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My first rule—before doing anything else—when writing a sentence, is to check whether I could have removed the em dashes by re-ordering the elements.
Update: in case it’s not obvious, I am sorry. I could not help it.
Update: I am sorry. In case it's not obvious — I could not help it.
FTFY
Em dashes are really good actually and a standard stylistic choice for non-technical writing, particularly outside the US.
They certainly have their place, but are massively overused in contemporary American prose. This might be slight more of an east coast thing, but that's just a subjective impression that I'm not willing to spend time measuring.
To me they come off as faddish, with many writers using them where commas and semicolons would have done just as well. I think their popularity stems from teh fact that provide the sense of a personal aside from the writer, allowing them to be more expressive while clearly delineating the personal or contextual remark from the main flow of the prose. No doubt this works for a lot of readers, but I find it tedious.
It's a fad that has been going strong for centuries in published literature, so I'd guess an awful lot of authors world disagree with you.
You can restructureany sentence to use fewer forms of punctuation -- but if you do that, you'll lose nuance. And nuance, in writing, is a very fine thing.
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I use them because I know what I want to say out loud, but transcribing the pause with commas is incorrect because it's a comma splice, and I find that the semicolon often looks glaringly overly formal. So I've settled on the em-dash.
English isn't my native language.
Also, I like em dashes.
And if this is my worst sin, so be it.
My writing used to be littered with them, but I now eschew the em in favour of en, as it has become too strong an anti-shibboleth.
I have also taken to being sloppier in my prose, as I’ve had stories rejected for being “written by AI” - when they’re shorts I wrote more than a decade ago. Reworked them to sound like a moron, accepted. Sigh.
> I now eschew the em in favour of en
They have different meaning and are not interchangeable.
For the use discussed here, they basically are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash_versus_em_dash
Fully aware - although now the broader meaning of the em dash has become “I am an LLM”.
I have a similar issue. I tend to have a very “structured” type of writing. Say on slack or Reddit for example. Using markdown formatting. Lists with bulletpoints etc. And I tend to write long detailed explanations, sometimes too long if I am being honest.
But now I find myself adding noise and imperfections to my writing (not that it was perfect) to make it more human, which is kinda silly.
The LLMs decided to use you as the model for the pinnacle of human communication style.
Either it's LLM generated, or it's written by someone who wants to be ambiguous about using LLMs.
Either way, I'm not reading it, it's a clanker or a clanker collaborationist.
I mean, how would you even write an em dash? There's no button in the keyboard for em dashes, it's not in ascii, it's just not something we write in internet text with, it's a safety watermark put into LLMs by OpenAI to help making LLM generated content identifiable as such.
If for some reason you are an em dash lover that was hurt by the LLM debacle, I'm so sorry for your loss, but look who's on your side, give the em dash a funeral and let it go.
Your argument goes as follows: “I’m incapable of it, therefore no-one is capable of it”.
Followed by, “You should abandon your preferences because I don’t share them”.
On some fields doing somethingothers are not capable is an advantage, on others it's elitism.
Language, communication, are more like the latter, communicarion benefits from everyone using a common language, except when that niche sociolect is domain specific, which an emdash isn't.
⌥ ⇧ +
It's been seared into my muscle memory for more than a decade. I keep using it, too. It's present in the popular training sets – and then in LLM outputs – simply because it's proper punctuation.
I wrote the article.
Sorry if I like em dashes.
It's alt + 151 BTW.
"clanker"
Slang for an AI, used by a Blade Runner
> I mean, how would you even write an em dash?
With a keyboard shortcut. Just because you are incompetent, that does not mean everybody is.