a human has never used an em dash in the wild
How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
111–120 of 492 posts
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#112This shows both the en dashes and hyphens for page ranges. Is one preferred?
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#113AFAIK 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.
If em dashes were uncommon pre-2022, they wouldn't have ended up in the LLM training sets.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#114> If you want to be official about things, use the en dash to replace a hyphen in compound adjectives when at least one of the elements is a two-word compound. How is a literal dictionary making fun of people who "wanna be official about things" lol. That's the entire basis for dictionaries themselves
It's Merriam-Webster - they are descriptivist rather than prescriptivist about language. They don't define correct usage per se, but rather document actual usage, though some usage may be given greater weight than others.
In this case, they are calling out the prescriptivist definition but are implying that it may be overkill and offering the more commonly used alternative.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree—LLMs don't use them properly. They always put a space between the words before – and after – the dashed part.
Using spaces is not wrong. Typographically, a hair space or another thinner than usual space is usually used, but in plain text a space is often preferred. Style guides vary of opinion on this, but newspapers often space them. Without a space they end up looking like elongated hyphens joining the words on both sides. That's not their function.
This is US vs British English. You will struggle to find an em dash in any British publication.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#116I refuse to care about this. A single dash is all I will ever use. I see no possible reason to use the other two.
That's the comment I was looking for to rally behind. I use the same character `-` for all purposes: minus, hyphen, em/en dash. It's easy to type and it makes practically no difference in meaning or legibility. I refuse to waste my time differentiating between multiple variations of a short horizontal line with a few pixels more or less. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#117AFAIK 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 recently got accused of using AI for some writing I submitted because I regularly use both en-dashes and em-dashes, and have for years. I said in another thread recently they are second and third, to semi-colons, as my favourite punctuation marks.
I was able to demonstrate my long use of them, prior to LLMs. And since I write in quarto markdown I don't need keyboard shortcuts.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#118Robert Bringhurst¹ prefers the en dash in the context of setting off phrases: "The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography. "Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal…
Presently re-reading this book, The Elements of Typographic Style. It’s one of the few books I’ve gone out of my way to get a physical copy of – it’s just beautiful. And I totally agree, space-set en dashes are vastly superior to em. I dislike the way it connects the word more closely to the word in the next clause than the phrase itself. E.g. He left—no explanation. Vs. He left – no explanation. To me, left—no feels…
Because I am exactly the kind of person to obsess about this sort of thing, when I was working on my last book, I spent a lot of time deciding how I wanted to style dashed subordinate clauses.
Personally, I think en dashes are too small and look like a mistaken use of a hyphen. I really only use them in their Chicago Manual of Style recommended uses like date ranges.
But I agree that em dashes without spaces around them look wrong. They glue the adjoining words together when the whole point is that the clause is secondary and should be set aside from the surrounding text.
I ended up using em dashes with a little blob of CSS to put a tiny amount of space on either side.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#119AFAIK 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 have typed Alt+0151 almost every day for decades—and now with some annoyance I am limiting their use due to the "that's how LLMs write."