151–160 of 330 posts
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Your first sentence is a perfect example of why emdashes need to exist. The comma is overloaded, since it can be used both as a list separator and for parenthetical asides. But that first sentence starts using them as a list separator, and then inserts a parenthetical aside into the list. Emdash wins this test.
I think parenthesis are ideal for a parenthetical aside.
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/…
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I think parenthesis are ideal for a parenthetical aside.
I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer. I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks lik…
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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.
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That is so stupid. Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large). Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power. The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.
Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references. This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_. It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one…
For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text.
Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.
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…
> people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling. The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when…
Guides such as S&W focus entirely on style. Then we have the dearth of guides on composing a good sentence.
Of course, S&W is also filled with insanely stupid advice. "Don't split an infinitive" immediately comes to mind. Ask yourself which sounds more powerful, oh fellow geeks:
* To go boldly where no one has gone before
* To boldly go where no one has gone before
Split infinitive form is so much better. "Don't split an infinitive" is one more smooth-brained 19th century rule invented by Latin-obsessed weirdos who thought it was the perfect language, and that they should impose Romance grammar on Germanic languages. (See also "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "don't start a sentence with a conjunction.")
I agree that post-COVID we have a glaring issue with the problem you highlight, but I don't think the focus on orthography is a symptom. Long ago, my dad criticized my résumé because I didn't put two sentences after periods despite me using a variable-spaced font. The man's nearly eighty. He's not exactly some 21st-century miseducation case.
One caveat I'll add at the end is that focusing on form isn't always bad. Form is one of the great joys of reading both poetry and prose. Word selection is often form rather than substance. The opening lines of Lolita are pure form. Nabokov could've easily just said "I'm a pedophile and Lolita is attractive to me." Instead, he chose words that have you overuse your tongue when you sub-vocalize, making the text feel uncomfortably erotic to a normal, non-pedo reader.
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Because it looks better and is a guide to communication. For the poster child of a naïvely set/composed text which suffers thereby see: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/vir... That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetti…
>Because it looks better and is a guide to communication. Personally, I think em-dashes (when in a font that shows the damn difference) look exaggerated and silly. They certainly don't provide any important guidance to its meaning that I can't derive from context. That was a cool toolbox BTW :)
Yes, the Studley tool cabinet is amazing, which makes the infelicities of the book all the more enraging.
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Wie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?
Wrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).
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.