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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#191

Post by NickDouglas »

eth0up wrote: post #182

Regarding the AI-perspective of the emdash being commiserated here... As a few have pointed out, many writers have been using it usefully since long before the blight. The current state of revolt is probably a phase though, as models will learn to account and adjust for the litany of literary crimes they've been committing. In some ways we are fortunate to have such easy signals to work with while, already, false pos…

Thank you, this is the deepest comment in the thread (and lol at all the self-demonstrating sentences).

I'm annoyed that so many people limit their analysis to shallow things like em dashes and "delve," and don't seem to have the critical thinking necessary to analyze textual construction, let alone actual meaning. Instead it's all cutesy remarks about how Emily Dickinson must have been an AI.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#193

Post by rcxdude »

adverbly wrote: post #93
eddyg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

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.

There's far more niche things in unicode, and I don't really see that much point getting angry over them.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#194

Post by tshaddox »

msisk6 wrote: post #171
douglee650 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Know the rules, fight the rules, I guess. More readable, but I’ve since regressed as tooling comes into play. Maybe it’s a good way to still use ems and differentiate from AI.

Looks and readability matter in writing. I always uses spaces on either side of the em-dash; looks too crowded otherwise to my eye. I've been doing doing it that way for so long I still often use the "--" construct from way back in ascii email days. At least I've gotten past the two-spaces after a period I learned from the typewriter. Most of the time, anyway.

To me it doesn't affect readability either way, but to my American English eye the surrounding spaces stands out as extremely non-standard.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#195

Post by win311fwg »

ryukoposting wrote: post #124
lesostep wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read the parenthesis as a secondary thought that is there if you want to take in additional context but where the main message can be read just as well without, whereas the em block is a deliberate interruption to call attention to context necessary to understand the main message.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#196

Post by gwerbin »

treetalker wrote: post #185
skinfaxi wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the first use of the hyphen disagrees: > The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time, hyphenation was joining two pieces of text that might otherwise be read as two separate words by a low tie mark. This was necessary due to the ambiguity inherent in the lack of word spacing. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a h…

If I understand correctly, that wouldn’t change things: hyphens are used in English to link words (e.g., “work-product privilege” — the noun work modifies the noun product , and the two together modify the noun privilege ) but two linked nouns of equal importance are a special case. (Not my intent to be pedantic.) This is not the best source (I’m pressed for time) but it gives a decent explanation: https://editorsman…

I have never heard of this role and I'm not aware of anyone who follows it. The document you linked says that it's only used "in certain styles". So it sounds like a stylistic choice that an editor may choose to use or not, rather than a rule to be followed everywhere.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#198

Post by yreg »

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.

Beautiful, goes straight into my Text replacements. Shame that I wasn't able to make Apple Shortcuts simulate typing this on ⌥^⇧-

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#199

Post by patcon »

moregrist wrote: post #190
bee_rider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, like in the References section for a paper? Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out (bibtex handles it more accurately that I could anyway). 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 t…

> Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied. > I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would…

Thank you :)

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#200

Post by treetalker »

gwerbin wrote: post #196
treetalker wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, that wouldn’t change things: hyphens are used in English to link words (e.g., “work-product privilege” — the noun work modifies the noun product , and the two together modify the noun privilege ) but two linked nouns of equal importance are a special case. (Not my intent to be pedantic.) This is not the best source (I’m pressed for time) but it gives a decent explanation: https://editorsman…

I have never heard of this role and I'm not aware of anyone who follows it. The document you linked says that it's only used "in certain styles". So it sounds like a stylistic choice that an editor may choose to use or not, rather than a rule to be followed everywhere.

Fair enough. I first learned of it on law review in law school, from the Texas Law Review’s Manual of Style.
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