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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 (-)

#451

Post by theelous3 »

MindBeams wrote: post #320
theelous3 wrote: post #104

Earlier 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."

What is more intellectual about wanting to complicate the language for one reason, versus wanting to simplify it for another?

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

#452

Post by lostlogin »

phlakaton wrote: post #239
energy123 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Emily Dickinson wept—

I had a quick search, attempting to find a great author who hated em dashes and preferred the vastly superior en dash. I found nothing.

This list of authors punctuation quirks is interesting though.

https://lithub.com/the-punctuation-marks-loved-and-hated-by-...

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

#453

Post by snozolli »

dragonwriter wrote: post #424
snozolli wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Its funny that people think that conventions for typewritten text built around the limitations of typewriters define what is “proper” in environments where typewriters and their limitations are not involved.

What does this have to do with what I wrote? I said nothing of the sort. In fact, I explicitly pointed out that HTML and WYSIWYG word processors address it automatically.

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

#454

Post by snozolli »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #428
snozolli wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

I was taught that and abandoned it as a pointless anachronism. How often are you reading long form text in a monospace font?

Often enough, thanks.

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

#455

Post by mmooss »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #167
divbzero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the dedicated minus (U+2212) over the hyphen-minus (U+002d) for mathematical use because they look different in most font faces. Are there cases where the dedicated hyphen (U+2010) is preferred over the hyphen-minus?

G. Brandon Robinson swears by U+2010 for hyphens in groff's Unicode output [0], but I see it as a hypercorrection. The most common convention by far (among authors who use Unicode and care about dashes) is to use U+002D for hyphens and U+2212 for minus signs. Not even the Unicode Consortium uses U+2010 for hyphens in its documents, and I'm not aware of any major organization that does. As far as appearance goes, almo…

Edit: G. Branden Robinson (note spelling) is the maintainer of groff.

https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/

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

#456

Post by aio2 »

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…

closest thing we have on hn to being a reddit like comment/remark lol

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

#457

Post by Aaron2222 »

culi wrote: post #277
minitech wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control+Command+Space or Fn+E or Edit > Emoji & Symbols if you know the character’s name. It’s not very convenient for repeated use, but it gets the job done in a pinch.

Yeah it's not great. Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it. Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol sigh Thanks for the suggestions

> Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it.

You can remap Fn/Globe directly to it if you want. It's also accessible from the Input menu bar item if you show that.

> Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol

Are you using the expanded Character Viewer window[0], or the default collapsed Emoji & Symbols pane[1]? Because the expanded Character Viewer lets you customise and reorder the categories[2] (though that doesn't affect search), including adding a full Unicode view[3]. And they both default to the search bar when opened (though the Character Viewer opens unfocused for some reason).

[0]: https://imgur.com/hTtrbcA

[1]: https://imgur.com/3L31DQu

[2]: https://imgur.com/Ch1PI5L

[3]: https://imgur.com/epayzwe

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

#458

Post by econ »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #272
econ wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted an array or object with range keys like: arr[0–2] = 123; if(arr[1.5555]>122){}

That doesn't seem to be an array at all, if the idea is to check whether a number is within a range. Seems like an interesting data type though, a combination of a range data type and a map/associative array.

I was thinking of a sparse array but any name will do. obj[~42] ?

One may have a bunch of key ranges each associated with a value or one may have a key that should be "rounded" to the nearest key or retreave the one below or above it.

It feels like something basic enough to have in a language and I found it oddly complicated to write myself. Comparing it with all values doesn't seem like a very good solution.

Not that I know many languages.

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

#459

Post by econ »

paulddraper wrote: post #243
econ wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted an array or object with range keys like: arr[0–2] = 123; if(arr[1.5555]>122){}

In Python it’s a colon.

Nice, covers at least some of the abstraction "problem".

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

#460

Post by emmelaich »

darajava wrote: post #178
emmelaich wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean en dash?

No. Em dashes are to separate two thoughts in one sentence. En dashes are for denoting ranges.

OK fair enough, I was referring to the fact that visually the hyphen is more easily distinguishable to the em than the en.
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