Comment by dalemhurley
15 days ago
Em dashes are commonly used in most countries that speak English. I get the feeling that people from the USA don’t use them often and now have tarnished the use of them.
15 days ago
Em dashes are commonly used in most countries that speak English. I get the feeling that people from the USA don’t use them often and now have tarnished the use of them.
Do you remember when the AIs were all writing with bullet points all the time? I miss that! I'd prefer that to the current more-information-density-than-any-human-would-ever-muster approach where sentences are packed so deep you can't get any meaning by skimming.
The three great epochs of AI:
Way too many bullets -> way too many emojis -> way too many em dashes
Hopefully they stay away from my damn tilda !
Like many other LLM tropes they were heavily overused which attracted attention. Normal English writing doesn't average 1 em dash per 2-3 sentences like I would often see during Peak Em Dash.
They aren't a complete rarity by any means but still relatively uncommon compared to the typical punctuation one sees in routine usage.
I loved em dashes back in high school and my English teacher would have definitely returned an assignment with a lot of red marks if I used em dashes as frequently as an LLM (speaking from experience).
Most complaints about AI writing are people telling on themselves for not reading broadly.