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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 (-)

#381

Post by a3w »

crazygringo wrote: post #63
a3w wrote: post #11

> 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…

copy/paste, "print", paste in from page, to to page

Result:

> print pages in range from: 1, 003

> print pages in range to 4

Now have I have two errors to fix: page 1003 to page 1004. Not nice. Who formats like this?!

-------------------

Also, some RPG books or encyclopedias I own have chapter that span like this:

p. 630 to p. 70 (book 2)

To me, now is unclear, is that 70 with a reset page count, or 670 for book 2?

Since I just now learned that a quotation standard somewhere outside Germany exists that omits leading numbers, I now need to manually check where it ends.

TL;DR:

Don't make me think, and allow for automation. So just write on more number.

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

#382

Post by handoflixue »

milesrout wrote: post #266
handoflixue wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> etc, actually it's "etc." (I wouldn't usually be a pedant, but if you think the difference between "--" and "—" matters, you should probably try to get the basics right too.)

Wrong. Look at any dictionary. Etc is completely fine. What next, are you going to pretend you write N.A.S.A. or Mr. White? Come on

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etc. - even the URL has the period, and I did in fact look this up before replying :)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etc even redirects to the correct URL with a "."

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

#383

Post by handoflixue »

MindBeams wrote: post #334
handoflixue wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you format your numbers properly, you get "285,368,737,954–285,368,783,645" That's a change of about 50K, which isn't really that hard to notice. "285368737954-83645" is... well I have to assume somewhere in the 10-100K range? Hold on a second while I line up the digits again... uh... let me rewrite that to "37,954 - 83,645", okay now I can read it. No, that wasn't any easier. I kept getting lost tracking where in…

>"285368737954-83645" is... well I have to assume somewhere in the 10-100K range? 83645 is five digits, so certainly in the ~10,000 range.

Thus why I have to assume it's somewhere between 10K and 100K, yes :)

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

#384

Post by zahlman »

zahlman wrote: post #176
lucgommans wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this meaning to grep for a double hyphen from standard in, or to mark the start of positional arguments and then grep for a hyphen? If you want both, it should be: $ python -m this | grep -- -- - Which is just beautiful (Your example causes the last hyphen to be grepped for, which happens to only match doubled-up ones because single ones don't occur in that text. The quotes/apostrophes do nothing because they're p…

Oh, of course simply quoting it doesn't disable the special meaning of --, because quoting is handled by the shell and argument parsing is handled by the program.

(Although that turns out not to matter for this particular grep invocation; the -- is still interpreted as a pattern and - as standard input.)

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

#385

Post by windward »

energy123 wrote: post #170
mmooss wrote: post #142

Here's an easy, if not always precise way to remember: * 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, s…

The em dash is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is the output of a LLM.

And you'd better not 'delve' into anything

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

#386

Post by Hnrobert42 »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #91

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.

I don’t care about the length of the mark, but I did find this idea useful. Prone to excessive detail, I often find myself with a parenthetical inside of parenthetical. The developer in me insists on 2 closing parentheses. But it looks weird and nerdy. Although, using an em dash instead is probably just as nerdy.

> Dashes are used inside parentheses, and vice versa, to indicate parenthetical material within parenthetical material. ...

> The bakery’s reputation for scrumptious goods (ambrosial, even—each item was surely fit for gods) spread far and wide.

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

#387

Post by opello »

JadeNB wrote: post #359
opello wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this The last paragraph of the article also addressed the subjective nature of spacing around the em dash: > Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it. As far…

> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it. It's funny that they omit to mention the possibility of setting it off with a thin space ' ' or hair space ' ' (those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters,…

> those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me

Interestingly, at least in my browser and grabbing the direct link to the comment with curl, show the bytes as 0x20 for both. Perhaps the comment submission handler, or even the browser, collated your more specific U+2009 (thin) and U+200A (hair) spaces into the regular U+0020 space?

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

#388

Post by lxgr »

rmunn wrote: post #346
lashloch wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny—I'm the exact opposite. The extra spaces distract my eyes. To each their own! :)

To each their own: fully agreed, even though our tastes differ. I will mention one advantage of the spaces-around-dashes method: word wrap with default settings will break on the spaces around the dashes so that the entire word one, dash, word two combo doesn't end up pulled onto the next line as a whole unit. Whereas the advantage of the no-spaces method that you prefer is that word wrap will pull the entire word on…

That depends on the layout engine, I believe. Just tried it in Firefox (on macOS; not sure if it uses Core Text or something custom there), and it does sometimes break around the em dash in "foo—bar" style, not just "foo – bar" style.

I've definitely noticed the behavior you describe on some layout engines, too, and it's another reason why I personally prefer "foo – bar" style.

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

#389

Post by zamalek »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #91

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.

This is coming from someone who can only speak English: what a stupid language. How is having 3 symbols that are discernible only by their, almost identical, length a good idea? How would one grade a paper for correct usage, especially if handwritten?

I agree with you completely.

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

#390

Post by thomasjb »

psychoslave wrote: post #348
thomasjb wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is intriguing to me, do you know which (programming) languages tolerate this?

Python python3 -c "some·identifier = 0; print(some·identifier)" C echo -e '#include \nint main() { int some·identifier = 0; printf("%d", some·identifier); return 0; }' | gcc -x c -o temp - && ./temp C++ echo '#include \nint main() { int some·identifier = 0; std::cout Ruby ruby -e 'some·identifier = 0; puts some·identifier' Javascript node -e 'let some·identifier = 0; console.log(some·identifier);' Rust echo 'fn main(…

Thank you very much for testing it! I'm plugging away on Advent of Code 2015 in C, I'll give this a go to see if I like it
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