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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#141

Post by acabal »

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.

At Standard Ebooks we use the three-em-dash to indicate a fully obscured word, for example this line from Tristram Shandy:

> He lies buried in the corner of his churchyard, in the parish of ⸻, under a plain marble slab

If we were to use three em dashes in a row, the renderer typically puts a 1-2px gap between them. Using U+2E3B leaves no gaps.

Likewise, we use a 2-em dash, U+2E3A, for partially obscured words, for example this line from Gogol's short fiction:

> The town of B⸺ had become very lively since a cavalry regiment had taken up its quarters in it.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#143

Post by zvr »

url00 wrote: post #23
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…

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.)

Microsoft recently introduced typing via Windows key plus hyphen (en dash) and plus shift (em dash). Much easier.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#144

Post by ericyd »

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.

My heart bleeds for the monospace font developers who have to design this glyph.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#146

Post by KPGv2 »

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…

I'm going to write my response using vernacular English so as to avoid AI claims, so pardon my French.

> We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English.

Lol no we're not. The only people who give a fuck about this em dash AI bullshit are losers on Tumblr and commenters on fanfiction sites who are obsessed with the idea that AI is the current Great Evil.

This is the orthographical equivalent of the New York Times running an article that soy-glazed avocado bouillon is the latest trend among Millennials because, like, one of the editors caught their college dropout son eating it one morning at the family table. Son said "duh dad everyone's doing it" to fuck with his dad, and next thing you know, a hundred think pieces on Mexican-Japanese breakfast being trendy.

I've never met an adult in my professional or personal life who actually gives a shit about this. We're talking a fraction of a percent of people who don't want you to use AI, and a fraction of that who waste their life trying to detect it.

Write the way you want. If people can read it, that's all that matters.

Apologies for the French. Blame Canada.

*Edit* Also the em dash is based. Using a double dash should be a prison sentence.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#148

Post by nananana9 »

inigyou wrote: post #86
uberman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. "

The parentheses bind tightly to "an addendum" and change the meaning

Not with my brain's precedence parsing rules.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#149

Post by troyvit »

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.

I'm going back to em dashes after this post, and anybody who calls me out is getting a link to it -- they can suck it up.

That said I've only been on Linux for 25 years so I still haven't figured out how to actually get em dashes and have to resort to the double minus like up there.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#150

Post by rrr_oh_man »

FabHK wrote: post #130
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).

> em-dash with spaces

my favourite (and I hope LLMs never converge to use it)

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