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

121–130 of 330 posts

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#121

Post by ikesau »

Waterluvian wrote: post #114
douglee650 wrote: post #72

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 off…

With HTML, I can do everything as a and the eyeball reader doesn't know/care. Where it matters is that I'm stripping semantic meaning, which hurts computers and possible accessibility devices. Most of my life, the same has been true about dashes. I use - for every one of the kinds you provided because - lives on my keyboard. Is there real value in caring? Does it have the same semantic—stripping effect for computers/…

I can't think of any case where a human gets confused by some text because a hyphen character was used instead of an em-dash, and maybe that's what you mean by real value.

But I see you using an em-dash to hyphenate "semantic-stripping" as a joke, which is funny. Is that real value? Is conveying to others that you're educated real value?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#122

Post by mark_something »

al_be_back wrote: post #118

Em dashes are indeed amazing! Go U+2014 ! has anyone used/seen em dashes in file/dir names? just wondered — I have't. It's certainly easier to read than a hyphen/minus...but i guess it may become problematic cross-platform (on windows/linux it isn't as straight forward as on macos).

I used to have ripped music that had em dashes in the filenames. But several music players displayed a question mark for it. So I replaced them all with a hyphen.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#123

Post by mark_l_watson »

My problem with AI use of em-dashes is that it covers up sloppy writing. I simply collected about six examples of horrible use of em-dashes and how I would have written the text. This became part of my SKILL for general writing (along with a lot of other specific examples).

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#124

Post by ryukoposting »

lesostep wrote: post #110
ryukoposting wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. They also use em dashes to repeat a word with emphasis, something that is done much better with parentheses and italics. > And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause. > And also occasionally (occasionally) one just needs a random dramatic pause. I know which one I'd rather read. Though, frankly, I'd prefer neither and I'm trying to remove this kind of thing from my own writing…

I can't be the only one that reads those two examples very differently. In a first example, the second "occasionally" is stressed, when in second example it feels almost whispered.

Interesting, I read both as emphasized. To me, the parens make the voice clear but the em dashes make it read like a typo.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#125

Post by xg15 »

douglee650 wrote: post #72

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 off…

Not to forget the chōonpu ー to mark elongated vowels in Japanese.

Konnichiwaー

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#127

Post by tshaddox »

douglee650 wrote: post #72

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 off…

I’m surprised to see that you put spaces around the em dash in your example.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#128

Post by jonathanstrange »

It annoys me that recently people seem to propagate the wrong use of em dashes. There is no space—an em dash is practically never typeset with spacing. You use an en dash in European typesetting – they have spaces, which your typesetting system hopefully adjusts to sane values. They're not like the spaces between words.

At least, that's how I learned it. Everyone seems to disagree and write em dashes with spaces nowadays.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#130

Post by FabHK »

douglee650 wrote: post #72

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 off…

Furthermore, the conventions for the first (parenthetical) use case, as far as I understand, are either em-dash without spaces (Anglosphere convention), or en-dash with adjoining spaces (Continental convention: German, French, etc.), but rarely em-dash with spaces (as in the article).
Post reply on HN