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Comment by hyperpape

2 days ago

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.

8 comments

hyperpape

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anotherevan  2 days ago

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. —

pvillano  2 days ago

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.

  • stogot  2 days ago

    I’ve seen people use colons where em dashes are effective. I use em dashes. AI leans heavily on them for same reason

    • mcmcmc  2 days ago

      It’s become the exclamation mark of mid-sentence punctuation. It connotes fragmented or interrupted speech in my opinion. The problem is that writing is not speech, that’s why it is more often seen in written dialogue.