401–410 of 492 posts
I use em dashes all the time in writing, but unfortunately ChatGPT and co. use the em dash frequently—and most people use the em dash infrequently, not knowing how to type it on a keyboard—so it's starting to make my writing look AI-generated sometimes. I fear it'll have to go the way of words like "tapestry." FWIW, you can type an em dash on Mac with shift + option + hyphen.
Em dashes without surrounding spaces is such a ugly relic that triggers me to no end and is objectively wrong. The dash object is part of the sentence — not the two words it's separating.
The perfect way to surround with hairspace.
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.
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…
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Across the Office suite: Typing yields an em dash. Typing yields an en dash. That this has been true for some 3 or 4 decades makes me doubt all the comments that em dashes are a "tell" of LLM authorship. On the other hand, I guess when we confine this possibility to web content, I can see how people haven't used Office for web authoring lately, and whatever they do use (like web-based content management systems) don'…
I can't get this to work in Powerpoint. It's funny, I clicked on this thread because I was struggling with trying to make an "emdash" in Powerpoint yesterday and couldn't find the correct search term for the "long hyphen" that I was looking for.
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space, minus, space is on the same level as manually typing two spaces after a period
Until ~10 years ago, I used to type two spaces after a period.
You can tell when I've edited something on both a phone and a physical keyboard, based on the inconsistent use of spaces.
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> 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?
Probably! I think HN strips out emoji; maybe it just takes the safest approach and strips out all non-white-listed Unicode.
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Across the Office suite: Typing yields an em dash. Typing yields an en dash. That this has been true for some 3 or 4 decades makes me doubt all the comments that em dashes are a "tell" of LLM authorship. On the other hand, I guess when we confine this possibility to web content, I can see how people haven't used Office for web authoring lately, and whatever they do use (like web-based content management systems) don'…
> Typing yields an en dash. More importantly, typing just a single hyphen minus in this constellation triggers the autoreplace, too. (Typing the double hyphen is only necessary without spaces in order to distinguish between an intentional hyphen and an em dash.)
From TFA:
> August 1–August 31
From a top comment:
> Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years
To achieve this using the replacement feature we're talking about would take something like which is ridiculous.
In professional typesetting, like a book, I sometimes see spaces flanking an em dash, however.
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…
People have approximated ellipsis by using `. . .`. I use ellipsis. Which ironically is way too short when viewed in monotype…
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Until ~10 years ago, I used to type two spaces after a period.
I'm still doing it when I am typing at a physical keyboard. Hard habit to break. I learned it so long ago too. You can tell when I've edited something on both a phone and a physical keyboard, based on the inconsistent use of spaces.
Hard habit to break. I learned it so long ago too.
Retraining myself to stop doing double-spaces took maybe a week.