441–450 of 492 posts
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I also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.
Funny—I'm the exact opposite. The extra spaces distract my eyes. To each their own! :)
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I also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.
The reason not to do this is observable in your post on my phone. The spaces cause the word wrapping algorithm to leave a dangling dash at the end of the line which looks ugly. Omitting spaces prevents the word break.
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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 "."
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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
>Mr. White As opposed to what, exactly?
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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
Etc. is an abbreviation for etcetera. Correctly signifying contractions, abbreviations, and acronyms is far more commonplace than using the correct dash. Almost everyone would have learned about shortening words in high school; many people leave university without ever having heard of an em dash.
This is all stuff you learn in school. Punctuation isn't obscure or niche. You may not have learnt about semicolons or em dashes in school but you should have and I did. As did anyone that has ever read a novel. There are two semicolons on the first page of the first Harry Potter book, a novel read by approximately every child of my generation. There are loads of examples of the proper use of dashes and other "obscure" punctuation marks in any professionally typeset text.
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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-p…
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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…
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Etc. is an abbreviation for etcetera. Correctly signifying contractions, abbreviations, and acronyms is far more commonplace than using the correct dash. Almost everyone would have learned about shortening words in high school; many people leave university without ever having heard of an em dash.
Etc is also an abbreviation of et cetera. Only Americans put pointless dots everywhere. This is all stuff you learn in school. Punctuation isn't obscure or niche. You may not have learnt about semicolons or em dashes in school but you should have and I did. As did anyone that has ever read a novel. There are two semicolons on the first page of the first Harry Potter book, a novel read by approximately every child of…
I was raised and educated in Africa, specifically the GCSE curriculum. I was taught to use etc.
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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.
Here's some examples where the en dash could make things more clear: -5--2°C post-war-pre-digital era See sections 10-O-15-Q Try Our New York-London Flight Connection!
-5—2
That looks like dogshit.
It's a mistake in the first place to decide to use only dashes and no spaces to convey all of this lol
-5 - 2 (Everyone knows a sign has no space - if you are building your sign for idiots try some of these:)
-5 > 2 -5->2 -5 2 -5 to 2 -5...2 Between -5 and 2
blah blah blah