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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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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 "."
Merriam-Webster is an American dictionary and therefore totally irrelevant to me.
For vanilla Emacs (without evil-mode), you can always do — "C-x 8 RET EM DASH" or "C-x 8 RET 2014". That's what "M-x describe-char" would tell you.
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That is an interesting observation. I wonder what percentage of the training text data for LLMs contains proper dashes, since a large part of it is user-generated content.
All self-respecting journalistic outlets use proper symbols. Where does the LLM get their opinions on “foreign affairs” from? Probably from the likes of New York Times like a standard lib... And it shouldn’t be hard for an LLM to learn to use proper symbols when synthesizing content from the everyman. It’s not like it works on the level of literal copy and paste.
Yeah that's a big problem with LLMs at the moment - people are having an argument online, and one of them posts a piece of text from an LLM and says "see, Grok/ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini agrees! You're wrong!", which only reveals how much they did not do their homework and that they're arguing on the basis of hear-say, just like the LLM; the LLM has no mind of its own. If 90% of the internet says A, it will defend A to the death. What's not part of the equation is how much of that 90% has the same source, financed by a certain group.
We have a LOT of work to do soon.
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…
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For those who downvoted this - how does a millimeter of difference in the length of a line matter?
Well-meaning can vary if you don't put spaces around your dashes, and a well—meaning writer wants to ease the job of the reader. ıt might simpıy not matter though, a miııimeter here and there, ı suppose.
I see what you did in the second paragraph too. It’s another example of “a millimeter of difference in the length of a line” mattering in that it looks weird, though it’s not much harder to read.
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Well-meaning can vary if you don't put spaces around your dashes, and a well—meaning writer wants to ease the job of the reader. ıt might simpıy not matter though, a miııimeter here and there, ı suppose.
An excellent example of why dash length matters. Because of the wrong usage of ‘—’ and ‘-’, it took me 10 more seconds of rereading and re-parsing your comment to understand what that first sentence meant. I see what you did in the second paragraph too. It’s another example of “a millimeter of difference in the length of a line” mattering in that it looks weird, though it’s not much harder to read.
Being able to render a variety of line lengths with different meanings is a cool and useful thing.
AFAIK 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.
I disagree—LLMs don't use them properly. They always put a space between the words before – and after – the dashed part.
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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!
In my region at least, -5 ~ -2°C, or -5°C ~ -2°C. If the something is making people confuse, we replace it with a suitable substitution. Re-educating people is really just last resort. Is there anything keeping us from changing it other than ego?