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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#71

Post by 1718627440 »

sarreph wrote: post #64
1718627440 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ("--", 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…

On a typewriter you can write symbols overlapping, so if you write '--' it becomes '–'.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#72

Post by douglee650 »

Author failed to explain the dash universe and their semantic assignments.

- em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — )

- en dash: expresses a range (1–100)

- dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley)

I'd also like to see more concise philosophy around em v. ellipsis, "limerance" is poetic (and ironically antithetical to this "essay" … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is personal.

I offer this feedback as a humorously offended fan of all sidecar prose (dash, ellipsis, parens, quotes, and meta typographical treatments) pre-AI era.

Finally, I'd love to hear from this author regarding modern use of period in modern comunication, with canonical use-case of bulleted list as example.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#73

Post by douglee650 »

etempleton wrote: post #20
moron4hire wrote: post #14

It's interesting that an article extoling the virtues of the em-dash isn't using them correctly. They don't get spaces around them.

I have seen this more and more and I don’t understand it.

I am personally a fan of space padded em-dash. Visually, semantically, it makes sense on all modern planes. There's an argument for line-break parsing.

Of course I recommend do-not-adopt, think Roman-cart-wheel-axle-width reasons.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#74

Post by customguy »

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 just thought of the most annoying blog in the world. Individual spacing between words, depending on how thoughtful you want the pause to be. And by "individual" I mean a different floating point number denoted amount of em each. em > em-dashes. Or put differently, em dashes em-dashes.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#75

Post by jachee »

thfuran wrote: post #52
url00 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like 2 space indention versus 4 or 8 space. I find the em-dash example pretty compelling because visually relaxes my eye more than commas do — similar to how prefer at least 4 space indention over 2. (Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)

I think offsetting the em dash with spaces is contrary to almost every style guide.

Chicago does it one way and AP does it the other.

I definitely prefer it un-spaced, though, personally.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#76

Post by anonthrownaway »

Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash.

I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based).

(ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#77

Post by usui »

You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B).

Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#78

Post by sarreph »

1718627440 wrote: post #71
sarreph wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On a typewriter you can write symbols overlapping, so if you write '--' it becomes '–'.

Sure... But overstriking takes more time and effort, which is why "--" was the convention.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#79

Post by ryandrake »

anonthrownaway wrote: post #76

Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash. I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I le…

Wie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#80

Post by eddyg »

usui wrote: post #77

You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B). Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.

"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry."

https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes

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