There were too many em-dashes in this article, so I think it was written with AI.
Em dashes are amazing
201–210 of 330 posts
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#202Melancholy ellipsis...
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#203Author 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…
> 5.2.1 Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens – to set off phrases."
– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#204AI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.
I had a throwaway Reddit account get banned from a local subreddit because I used an em-dash when asking: "Do you have an alternative to Facebook — e.g. a mailing list?" The mods' full response when I asked about it was: "AI".
And it really couldn't have been anything other than the em-dash because I've been deleting the account's comments when they were about a week old so there were no previous comments to draw any conclusions from.
I don't care though, I've been using em-dashes since the late '90s making me partly responsible (along with all the other em-dashers) for LLMs being so fond of them, so I'm not going to stop just because of them.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm sorry but someone has to stand up for simplicity and to stop garbage from making its way into open public standards.
The bar has to be set somewhere. How many people actually use this thing? We can't go introducing characters into standards just because six people with power want some claim to fame.
I for one wasn't even aware that Unicode characters could be so large. Did they have to make a special exception for this or are there other characters that are that wide?
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#206Author 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…
My favorite is the Chad Wittgenstein usage. — Where you add an em-dash after periods to slow down the reader. —— Sometimes a double em-dash to keep your reader on their toes.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#207LLMs abuse em-dashes by putting them in places where a comma would be more appropriate. Especially as the separator before the last item in a list (in place of an "Oxford comma"). Classic LLM-speak em-dash mistreatment is something like, "This design brings performance, power — and speed."
They also like to use em-dashes excessively, especially in bulleted lists, to separate a topic from a comment in each list item.
Avoid those and you're fine. They aren't good writing style anyway. Used well, em-dashes are good!
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.
That's not what I said or what I intended to imply.
I think it's stupid because It sounds like the thing that I would assume almost nobody encounters. Like so few people that this is not needed. If more than 10,000, people have ever typed this thing out for its intended purpose, I stand fully corrected.
The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards.
How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.
This isn't some some language that thousands of people speak. To me this seems like some weird thing that some drunk academic came up with and told his friends about.
Also, this thing is freaking huge. How many characters are this wide? Should the bar be higher to introduce obviously weird characters?
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52 I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.
Would like to see how this looked handwritten.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#210>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 em dash is right there for you.
this is several sentences bound together in a rat king and furthers my theory that the use of more exotic punctuation like em dashes is the linguistic equivalent of a code smell. It may do the job, but it strongly indicates that your writing would benefit from rephrasing the entire sentence.