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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 (-)

#81

Post by o11c »

tedunangst wrote: post #50
kbenson wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on my terminal locale settings and man (well, troff/groff most likely) was converting hyphens in param definitions to some sort of dash character, meaning I couldn't copy and paste out of the man page. I think it also affected perldoc for the same reason. I don't doubt there are publishing platfo…

This is because the original was written using the wrong markup. When the output was ascii, nobody noticed, but it matters when the output is unicode.

That's revisionism. It was considered correct historically, before someone decided to unilaterally declare all existing man pages "wrong".

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

#82

Post by nextos »

encypherai wrote: post #38
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.

Yes, several of the most popular (and even lesser-popular but newly open-sourced models such as Gemma 3 27b) overuse Em dashes. Even when prompting them to not use dashes, they almost can't help themselves and include them occasionally anyways as it must be part of their learned stylometry. It's just not a common symbol to use at all as most people generally use commas for the same purpose. I can't even remember lear…

I submitted an application which I typeset using LaTeX, and some people thought it was AI-generated because of en and em dashes. I have been using these since forever.

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

#83

Post by dragonwriter »

jml7c5 wrote: post #6
n2d4 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alt+hyphen or alt+shift+hyphen is an endash/emdash. You may not have been aware of it because it's so subtle, but many people (including myself) used emdashes long before 2022 (edit: apparently only on Mac, see reply below)

I believe that's only on MacOS.

I think Microsoft Office (maybe jiat Word, but definitely not Windows) has a similar default shortcut.

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

#84

Post by jbverschoor »

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.

Except for international where € is opt-shift-2 (next to the pound/hash), next the to dollar

modifiers:

opt-e+letter é (acute/aigu)

opt-`+letter è (grave)

opt-i+letter û (circumflex)

opt-u+letter ü (umlaut)

opt-n+letter ñ (for the mañana)

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

#86

Post by jbverschoor »

tshaddox wrote: post #61
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.

I've been Googling "em dash" and copypasting from the Google results for a solid 15 years now. Long before LLMs.

Just use the Raycast emojipicker, it's very good. Better and faster than the macOS one

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

#87

Post by dragonwriter »

maegul wrote: post #49
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.

Certain corners of the world have absolutely cared about and employed the proper use of all the “dashes” well before but all the way up to 2022. I’d imagine LLMs have just consumed some of that material.

Pretty much everything professionally edit and typeset does, and those will generally be retained in Unicode text (obviously, not if it gets converted to ASCII). It’s less common in internet fora because not all users either know the use of dashes or have easy access to them on the devices they are using, and if its not both familiar and easy, people are going to skip it in quick messages.

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

#89

Post by TacticalCoder »

necovek wrote: post #68
kingo55 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More sophisticated clients require we use dashes correctly. I first encountered it pre-pandemic, so in professional contexts it's not a sure-fire signal of LLM use — Should you see em dashes correctly used in the Hacker News comments or Reddit, for that matter, then it's pretty reliable tell... Usually. ;)

As I mentioned above, I've had them easily accessible with a keyboard layout for >20 years on all the systems I've used — the only caveat that I find it really ugly with no spaces around em-dashes, which is usually recommended for English.

[dead]

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

#90

Post by heyjamesknight »

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.

I disagree—LLMs don't use them properly. They always put a space between the words before – and after – the dashed part.
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