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How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

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Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#71

Post by LeoPanthera »

dkdcwashere wrote: post #36
pavlov wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s largely the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. You’ve started noticing it because you just learned about it.

yep. been using them for years. others have too. it’s not weird same thing happened with “delve” — these are just words and grammar, people use them there is no accurate way to tell whether text came out of a neural network or not

Gemini is in love with the phrase "It's important to..."

Whenever I see that at the start of a paragraph I know that there's an 80% chance it was written by Gemini.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#72

Post by culi »

alabastervlog wrote: post #12
thesauri wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Macs: Hyphen -: - En Dash –: alt - Em Dash —: alt shift -

The default US English Mac keyboard is so extremely good, and has been the way it is for so long, that I remain baffled that other platforms haven't simply copied it. I came to it relatively late in life and it's one of the reasons I wish I'd started using Macs sooner.

It's pretty decent but the fact that I can't type an arbitrary unicode character has been a huge annoyance of mine since I switched from Windows/WSL to Mac.

They have shortcuts for Í, Î, and Ï but not for many commonly used characters like arrows

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#73

Post by Eric_WVGG »

agys wrote: post #40
alabastervlog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default US English Mac keyboard is so extremely good, and has been the way it is for so long, that I remain baffled that other platforms haven't simply copied it. I came to it relatively late in life and it's one of the reasons I wish I'd started using Macs sooner.

This specific key combination is not US keyboard specific. I like how they managed to group characters that are formally similar by binding them to the same keys. Examples: en and em are on - Below are maybe Swiss specific? ~ is on N @ is on G | and \ and / are on 7 √ is on V ¥ is on Y and € is on E ∑ on W ( ∑ is a rotated W :) etc.

my favorite example of this is ellipsis … opt-; (the key with the colon over the semicolon is sort of a rotated ellipsis)

thank you for teaching me √

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#74

Post by culi »

bangaladore wrote: post #26

Somewhat off topic, however, I'm thoroughly convinced that there is a very high probability something is AI generated when I see Em dashes. Anyone else noticing this? ChatGPT for example almost always uses them. I'm sure they are more common in academic writing, but its now super common on boards like Reddit.

Everyone I know that writes a lot, especially for copy or product design, seems to use em dashes more heavily. I've even seen a Drake format meme where he is shaking his head at parantheses, commas, and colons but—finally—nodding in approval at the em dash.

I wonder if it's a more recent phenomenon.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#75

Post by nayuki »

Additionally:

* Use the minus sign /−/ (U+2212) when formatting numbers, because the default hyphen-minus /-/ (U+2D) just looks wrong: "It is −1 °C vs. -1 °C." Moreover, the correct minus has the same width as plus (− vs. +).

* Rare, but use the figure dash /‒/ (U+2012) or figure space / / (U+2007) if you need a placeholder character that is the same width as a single digit. For example, "Guess the PIN: 1‒34."

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#76

Post by op00to »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #3

AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: -- Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.

My LLM prompts all have “don’t use em dashes or semicolons ever” when I send the output to someone else. ;)

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#77

Post by ludicity »

I use em-dashes correctly because a reader emailed me, and I was dreadfully embarrassed. You can actually see them become correct in my writing after the "I will pile drive you" AI thing.

It never occurred to me that doing this correctly might make people think I use LLMs in my writing.

Edit: I'm sure the many typos protect me from that, actually.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#78

Post by culi »

crazygringo wrote: post #70
867-5309 wrote: post #39

minus (US negative) enters the chat..

Seriously. If you want your − + to match, in terms of crossbar vertical position and width.

For comparison—

− + minus sign

- + hyphen

– + en dash

— + em dash

−+-+–+—

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#79

Post by [deleted] »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #3

AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: -- Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.

[deleted]

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#80

Post by o11c »

One point that is very rarely mentioned is how to place em dashes around quotations marks.

If the em dash indicates an interruption (not a planned pause) of the actual speech, the em dashes go inside the quotes (often just one, before the closing quote).

If the em dash is the narrator interjecting with additional information, the em dashes go outside the quotes.

Besides this, the question of where to put spaces when multiple forms of punctuation are combined can be quite a complex topic.

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