Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 330 posts

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#61

Post by Telemakhos »

sarreph wrote: post #3
jdw64 wrote: post #2

I feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters. When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing? It's strange to see sophistication become…

I too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it. We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving ov…

The double-hyphen is by no means "old school": it's a kludge for twentieth-century systems like typewriters and word processors that did not have em dashes or an easy way to insert them. The very names "em dash" and "en dash" should illustrate their age: they go back to the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.

The idea that a double-hyphen is "old school" is on par with the false notion that double-spacing between sentences is a product of the typewriter; one need only look at a typeset book from before the twentieth century to see the truth, or look at a decent image of the Declaration of Independence or other hand-written document from prior centuries to see the extra space left between sentences.

Many of the changes we see in written English style are the product of ignorance of the past beyond two generations or so. Avoiding em-dashes to keep up with the latest anti-AI fad is just reacting mindlessly to the stimulus of popular ignorance instead of deliberately situating one's style in the history of writing conventions.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#62

Post by globular-toast »

I've used dashes in typeset works ever since I learnt how to do them in (La)TeX (---). You don't usually put spaces around them, though.

There are actually four different "dash" type things in TeX: a hyphen, an en dash (for ranges like "10--20 pages"), em dash (---), and the minus symbol ($-$).

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#63

Post by ryukoposting »

uberman wrote: post #36
koolala wrote: post #12

Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.' I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the sam…

I would always prefer to do: " There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and, guess what, parentheses are right there for you. "

> There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence and realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and guess what? Parentheses are right there for you.

That's what I'd do. Note the conversion of the first comma to "and," as well.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#64

Post by sarreph »

1718627440 wrote: post #15
sarreph wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it. We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving ov…

> ("--", the old school way of writing it) The old school of writing it in digital documents. Typesetting predates and is not limited to digital documents.

Good point, but I think it's a little more complex than that.

To my knowledge (and what I meant by "old school"), it was common to type a "--" dash on typewriters[0] because most of them lacked en- and em-dashes, which are obviously not digital documentation devices.

But yes, typesetters of old (old, old school!) had myriad glyph blocks available to them for pressing!

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Typewriter_conventi...

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#65

Post by scoot »

WillAdams wrote: post #19

One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted: - − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative - I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary - × (multipl…

> … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces

I'm curious why? Kerning? Regardless, it sounds like a lot of work

> but really should find a copy of the actual magazine....

Uh, "..." ;)

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#66

Post by II2II »

etempleton wrote: post #17
akaike wrote: post #11

AI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.

Same. It is really annoying to write something and have someone say, “just so you know, em dashes makes it obvious it was written by AI.” You know how else uses em dashes? People who know how to write.

> It is really annoying to write something and have someone say (...)

It's worse than that. What they are saying is the equivalent to saying that knowing how to do something properly, and having the attention to detail to do so, makes it obvious it was written by AI. It sounds like a prelude to human incompetence, to ensuring that AI products are better than human ones.

About the only semi-convincing argument that I've heard is that AI over uses these tells. But let's face reality here: a lot of people griping about AI generated or AI assisted writing are not looking at over use. Plus a lot of people tend to over use the said tells while they learn how to use them properly.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#67

Post by swe_dima »

I also love them - makes spotting AI written content easier. People debated implementing complex algorithms how to watermark AI content - but luckily AI just settled on it by itself.

(sorry for a bit of gaslighting)

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#68

Post by vitorsr »

Nothing wrong with CMOS/APA/MLA dashes, I quite like them but usage in LLM prose has ruined it for me. AP dashes are weird, too much horizontal spacing, looks horrible and can really erode typographic color sometimes. "International" Oxford/Cambridge spaced dashes is nicest.

The funny thing is at both extremes, either none or indiscriminate use of dashes like in TFA, is a canary of "human writing".

People (including comments here) often attribute LLM use to prevalence in training data but it is probably far less common in the wild than we are led to believe, the more likely scenario is that whatever text-to-text normalization tools used ended up inserting whatever their idiosyncratic typographic styles were.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#69

Post by WillAdams »

scoot wrote: post #65
WillAdams wrote: post #19

One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted: - − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative - I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary - × (multipl…

> … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces I'm curious why? Kerning? Regardless, it sounds like a lot of work > but really should find a copy of the actual magazine.... Uh, "..." ;)

The big reason for manually constructing an ellipsis is to ensure consistent spacing for the 3 and 4 dot forms --- some typefaces will include both, but may not fit well if the type specs have the text set tight or loose.

My apologies, should I have typed \thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#70

Post by WillAdams »

jonhohle wrote: post #60
WillAdams wrote: post #19

One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted: - − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative - I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary - × (multipl…

If you’re on a Mac or iOS, it’s extremely easy to use the global text substitution to replace three periods (..., v...) with ellipsis (…, ⋮), and other symbols ((c), (r ), ^o, etc.) with their Unicode equivalent (©, ®, °, etc.).

Once upon a time there was COMPOSE.exe on Windows, then allchars, and now we've come full-circle to wincompose:

https://wincompose.info/

Post reply on HN