If it's important in English, it should have a key on the keyboard. It follows that if it doesn't have a key, it's not important.
How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
371–380 of 492 posts
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have read her in the past and can't say there were world's of meaning between -'s. Can you link an example? I looked again and couldn't see any obvious ones. Generally she just completely abused the -. Does she even use a comma once? lol
worlds. world's would indicate that a world owns something. Also, you can just write -s instead of -'s as the apostrophe indicates possession
Exactly the type of comment I'd expect to see on an HN discussion about different types of dashes.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Throwing my hat in here. The sub millimeter difference in the length of a dash conveys no additional meaning or clarity. It is impossible to argue me out of this position. It's not like you can reliably write these consistently by hand either without going over the top in length to make it extremely obvious.
This sort of anti-intellectualism is the perfect antidote for those who claim that improper grammar is nothing more than evidence of language "evolving."
I think many grammar rules are not intellectual but just randomly evolved conventions.
E.g. some English language rule says that a comma or ending period of a non-quoted sentence goes inside the quotes if there's something quoted at the end of that sentence. That rule feels anti-intellectual to me, as if there's some misunderstanding of how hierarchical placement in one-dimensional space works (since something that's not being quoted is being put inside quotes)
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes. For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which m…
It's actually only your post that made me realize people don't normally put spaces around em dash. In French, Russian and a bunch of other languages proper typesetting is to use em dash as a standard dash character, and you always put spaces around them. So I did it in English as well, for many years now. (I also now looked up and found out that in Spanish, apparently, you are supposed to put space only on one side o…
people don't normally put spaces around em dash
For what it's worth, I was in the last class in my high school to learn typing on IBM Selectric typewriters. We were taught to type two spaces, two hyphens, then two spaces. Incidentally, we were taught two spaces after periods and colons. To this day, I find it hard to read text that doesn't have proper spacing after periods. (HTML and WYSIWYG word processors handle formatting, but e.g. fixed-font text editors don't)
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024 and 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level[1]. “The average person” isn’t really a high bar, unfortunately. 1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
Is this a legitimate institute? The linked article offers many statistics and even financial figures but cites no sources or studies. There is a “TOLL FREE” (capitalized) phone number in the website footer, and the comments are full of prostitution ads.
Wikipedia[1] contains more links to data, if you want to sample a few more sources.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has nothing to do with being on a Mac. Em-dashes and the compose-key work fine on Linux, and Android has them under the '-' of the on-screen keyboard when long-pressed. (Windows probably has some way, but those are rarely discoverable.)
I disagree, there is absolutely no easy way to do it on Windows. You can install a third party program that emulates the compose key but on macos it "just works". And I think that makes a difference for 95% of users
It's a bit funny. On macOS en and em dashes can be natively typed with alt+- and alt+shift+-. The responses to your comment are apparently suggesting these methods are just as easy as that:
1. Install and configure this extra tool, which also by default enables a ton of other things you may not want, and may as well be a third-party tool even though it's technically built by Microsoft
2. Do a Google search and copy-paste (!)
3. Use a keyboard shortcut to bring up a symbol picker, then click on the tab containing the en and em dashes, then click to type them in
I mean, come on.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally never seen this (wish I could grep all comments I've ever replied to) and I do not understand what makes you say that it's clearer when it's dropping information, making it relative rather than a fully qualified number 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…
I think you're just not used to it. Quick, tell me how wide this range is, just as an order of magnitude: 285368737954–285368783645 Would be a lot easier if I only included the range at the end which had actually changed, wouldn't it? That's why it's clearer. Now obviously that was an extreme example, but it's also easier to see at a glance that 1,387–9 is just three pages, as opposed to 1,387–1,389.
Taken to an extreme without formatting, sure, but what ranges have that many digits in human-readable situations? And if there are those exception situations, you can word around it for that case ("285368760800±45691" or "45'691 years after 285'368'737'954")
Genuinely trying to think of an examples, since e.g. books aren't ever that long and search results don't have that many pages (that you'd all read and refer back to). A salary range, perhaps, can get into the seven digits in extreme cases (not that you care about any individual digit when you make a lifetime's worth of money in a bit more than a year): "Prospective salary is 2'423'000 to 2'432'000" seems to convey the relevant info as well as "Prospective salary is 2'423'000 to 9'000" does (except that I wouldn't understand the latter and ask what this second number means, but that's plausibly attributable to me as an individual not being used to it)
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#378I refuse to care about this. A single dash is all I will ever use. I see no possible reason to use the other two.
Throwing my hat in here. The sub millimeter difference in the length of a dash conveys no additional meaning or clarity. It is impossible to argue me out of this position. It's not like you can reliably write these consistently by hand either without going over the top in length to make it extremely obvious.
Em dashes don’t convey much meaning or clarity for me.
Rather, seeing too short of a dash is like putting two clashing colors together or wearing two pieces of clothes that don’t match. It just looks instantly off.
It’s just not aesthetically pleasing for me.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#379AFAIK 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.
It's pretty bonkers (and mildly depressing, really) to imply that correct grammar and usage is a reason to accuse someone of using an LLM.
I mean if it's an obvious break from their normal style, sure. But by itself? Every time I hear this argument, it just seems like sour grapes from poor writers.
Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
#380AFAIK 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.
For a while, em dashes were really popular among LLM enthusiasts because of the idea that it would encourage the LLM to draw from training data that contained em dashes—which typically were higher quality training data written by a professional writer or somebody with a professional editor. Subjectively, I think it worked. I suspect that the LLMs trained to be used as chatbots were finetuned to use the em dash liberally for that reason. Now, after a few generations of these models, I think that the em dash is starting to have the effect of drawing from "slop" training data that was written by other LLMs rather than well-written human data.