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10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

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Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#41

Post by hekkle »

wlesieutre wrote: post #34
hekkle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.

You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science. If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't…

> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?

Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#42

Post by thwarted »

hekkle wrote: post #30
keybored wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves.

It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.

The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#44

Post by gerdesj »

thwarted wrote: post #40
gerdesj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you feel the need to dive in with a dash (m, n or otherwise), why not stop ... think for a while: consider going in with a colon instead?

Emdashes are useful for an embedded appositive phrase, which a colon can't handle the same way.

Quite - horses for courses. However: you should pick your weapon with some care.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#45

Post by PunchyHamster »

namanyayg wrote: post #22
hekkle wrote: post #21

[flagged]

It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI. I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt. My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.

Yeah, just writing in Word (and few other) will get your - turned into em dashes. Personally I hate them. Mostly coz of random editors making GNU cmdline options into emdash and so breaking copying but I also think they are ugly, way too long in most fonts

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#46

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

hekkle wrote: post #30
keybored wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves.

It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.

Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2].

[0] https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html

[1] https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-...

[2] https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#47

Post by pastel8739 »

riazrizvi wrote: post #36

Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on. The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message bas…

What if having an audience isn’t the goal?

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#48

Post by pastel8739 »

hekkle wrote: post #35
danadam wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked on some random post from 2020, 19 em-dashes.

You do realise there are AI checkers online. https://www.zerogpt.com/ assesses this content as: 27.49% ChatGPT While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still , (probably not for much longer…

You do realize (god I hate that phrase) it’s impossible to definitively classify something as AI- or human-produced?

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#49

Post by Cogito »

Buttons840 wrote: post #27
namanyayg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI. I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt. My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.

It's not that hard. Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.) Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it…

It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.

As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.

For example, in the article we have:

If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.

When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:

    If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]

    If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.

Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.

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