Em dashes are amazing (psychotechnology.substack.com)

I feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters.

When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing?

It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself.

In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on

The economy may collapse and the job market rendered irreparable but the real victims of the AI boom are the em-dash and the sparkle emoji

Troglodyte here... I never use em dashes, never use semicolons, overuse ellipses and commas.

I really don't get liking em dashes. Just use two sentences or modify your original one. Both options are clearer like 90% of the time.

AI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.

Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'

I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?

i typically enjoy a good profanity-laden rant, but something about this particular one feels very forced. this sentence, for example: "[...] What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.". i cant really put my finger on why, but it almost feels like the author wrote their rant, then came back afterwards with a quota of fuck/shit/bitch they wanted to meet, placing them wherever they could.

in any case, i mostly agree with the author that ai has co-opted too many things to be concerned about it anymore. i remember being linked a list of "1,000 words not to use" because ai used them a lot (e.g. "delve", "absolutely", etc.) and the venn diagram with the 1,000 most common english words was practically a circle. you would be unintelligible if you rigorously avoided them all. now i just write without care of my ai-similarity score.

It's interesting that an article extoling the virtues of the em-dash isn't using them correctly. They don't get spaces around them.

I didn't know that AP style recommended spaces either side of the em dash. Here in the UK we generally use en dashes instead, and I thought em dashes always had no spaces. Apparently the wire machines that AP sent their news out by in olden times couldn't always do en dashes.

One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted:

- − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative

- I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary

- × (multiplication symbol) for use in dimensions and when actually indicating multiplication

- ′ and ″ (single and double primes) for use when indicating feet and inches, or minutes and seconds

- it also made explicit the difference between º (ordinal o) and ° (degree symbol) and noted when to make use of the other ordinals

- … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces

- © ® ™ ℠ ℗ (copyright and so forth) to indicate such legal constructs as appropriate

- the various spaces en and em space, non-breaking flex space, &c.

I _think_ I still have a photocopy somewhere, but really should find a copy of the actual magazine....

The far more egregious and reprehensible thing is that many books now are published using quite pedestrian typing of the near equivalents from the keyboard as opposed to actually typing the correct signs.

I wrote a bit on this at:

https://tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf

(note that it intended to be printed, folded, cut in the center, then re-folded so as to make a "hot dog" booklet: https://www.makingbooks.com/hotdog.shtml )

EDIT: That said, folks should be sure to get:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41600.The_Mac_is_Not_a_T...

or

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358248.The_PC_is_Not_a_T...

iOS settings-> general->keyboard

Turn off smart punctuation.

Saves bytes.

One thing I've always loved about Apple's OSs is that they will render an em dash if you press-and-hold the hyphen key.

Great accessibility.

> Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes?

Some people even take pride on being able to detect (often falsely) AI generated work.

I do indeed mis-using dashes.

Spaced en dashes are far more common internationally. Em dashes are primarily a US American tradition.

I get it. But I never would have until I built muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut.

LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.

> “But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.

Hell yes, and ROFL. I’m tired of em dashes being cited as evidence of AI.

and here i thought "option -" was an em-dash, but no, it's an _en_-dash.

I still use them unapologetically. I don't give a shit about your AI purity tests, thank you.

> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think?

If I'm writing something, typically I want to share my thoughts with other people and get their feedback. It won't work if they dismiss my writing because of some superficial stylistic choice, without even trying to engage with the ideas that I'm trying to express.

I never see emdashes squeezed tightly to the word before them.

I only ever see them with an AP-style spacing before and after.

Why the hell did they bury this thing three key-presses down on any keyboard???

This post is so self-consciously dependent on inserting em dashes everywhere that it kinda supports its own counterargument. If you're going to make a case for em dashes enabling more fluid writing and more distinctive voice, then you ought to actually use them that way.