141–150 of 492 posts
I'm just gonna say it: this does not matter. Just use whatever you want. If you're afraid that someone is going to think less of you for it: the people who matter won't.
* Hyphens connect things, such as compound words: double-decker, cut-and-dried, 212-555-5555.
* EN dashes make a range between things: Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years: both connect not only the endpoints, but define that all the space between is included. (Compare the last usage with the phone number example under Hyphens.)
* EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts: 'What the—!'; A paragraph should express one idea—but rules are made to be broken.
Unicode has the original ASCII hyphen-minus (U+002d), as well as a dedicated hyphen (U+2010), other functional hyphens such as soft and non-breaking hyphens, and a dedicated minus sign (U+2212), and some variations of minus such as subscript, superscript, etc.
There's also the figure dash "‒" (U+2012), essentally a hyphen-minus that's the same width as numbers and used aesthetically for typsetting, afaik. And don't overlook two-em-dashes "⸺" and three-em-dashes "⸻" and horizontal bars "―", the latter used like quotation marks!
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 tried to use real hyphens and dashes since learning a bit about typography roughly 10–15 years ago. macOS makes it really easy with just alt and hyphen for en-dash, shift+alt and hyphen for em-dash. Definitely not an "obvious tell" of an LLM!
(Side note: GTP says apostrophes should be used for pluralizing only for single letters to avoid confusion, but this seems more readable than "ens and ems" IMO.)
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.
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.
So you're saying that when you see an Em dash in someone's prose, it's a big minus?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying that when you see an Em dash in someone's prose, it's a big minus?
As I said in another comment, it depends highly on the context and previous / alternative knowledge of the source.
:)
> spans pages 128–34. Who omits the 1 from the second number?! That is aweful!
Who keeps the 1? You write pages 1,003–4, instead of typing out 1,003–1,004 which is just unnecessary. Works the same with two digits, or even three: pp. 1,899–902. This is standard practice and arguably clearer. I've only ever seen it done with page ranges, though. I'm not sure if it's done with year ranges? E.g. 1984–5? Or 1989–92? You work with page ranges constantly in academia, I just don't see year ranges much…
In speech, it's common, and misunderstandings are usually not a problem (if you're not monologuing on a recording) because someone will just ask; but in writing it looks like the range is the wrong way around. Maybe I expect more care in writing because the feedback loop is longer, or maybe it's just habit and I think it's wrong in writing because I never see it?
I refuse to care about this. A single dash is all I will ever use. I see no possible reason to use the other two.
-proud dash luddite
As a result, a hallmark of GPT-generated text is its (over)using of the em dash--I have stopped using it for this reason an just use two hyphens now instead.
Today in “typesetting before we had typewriters”: … At least we have dedicated O/0, and l/1 keys now. But we still see a lot of "straight" quotes instead of “those smart quotes Microsoft Word likes to generate”. And dashes. Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character? This is often set with slightly more space between dots than ..., and it by definition never wraps across a line between those dots. You still…
And the 1 and 8 aren't next to each other anymore, either. (See typewriters from the "18"00s.)
> those smart quotes
Fixing straight quotes is a hard problem[0]. My FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], includes my library, KeenQuotes[2], for replacing them at build time. It's not perfect, but can typeset my ~400 page novel without any errors.
> Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character?
Yes! Here's where it gets parsed:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...
Then emitted:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...
Then transformed into an HTML entity:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...
When typesetting Markdown, KeenWrite first converts the document to XHTML (i.e., XML), then invokes ConTeXt to convert XML into TeX macros. One of those macros handles the ellipses by converting it to \dots{}:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/-/blob/main/x...
This renders as the Unicode character in the final document: …
> set with more care for details
Some of us old folks care about these details. ;-)