Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also shouldn't forget the Eminem dash: –—–. Recommended for use in censoring words in rap songs.
—–—, I believe.
Oof, yes.
Em dashes are amazing
211–220 of 330 posts
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#212Earlier 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.
>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.
Counterpoint: the people who use tools the most should be the ones designign and creating them. All you have to do is continue not using it just like you did before it existed, but instead you insisted that its existence make sense to you as someone who doesn't need it and doesn't do what it's meant to help with.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
>I would assume almost nobody encounters
That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m surprised to see that you put spaces around the em dash in your example.
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.
Every AI response I've seen that uses em dashes also includes spaces around them.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#215Earlier 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…
I do have a PhD, and I have crawled up the trees of citations on occasion. But they were not so huge that I needed to manage them actively. But it was STEM, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that more complex bibliographies exist elsewhere.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#216half the thread is people arguing about en dashes vs em dashes and the other half is people who just found out there are two kinds of dashes. typography is the only field where knowing the difference makes you more upset, not less
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#217Earlier 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.
This is very common parlance in law
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#218I am overjoyed with how many commenters we have here who enjoy talking about typography.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Em dashes don't nest (but that's probably a good thing).
That is a weakness of sorts, but yes, unless one is attempting a particular, niche affect, an urge to nest parenthesis is usually a cue to re-write the sentence instead.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#220Author 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…
In many countries around the world, em dashes also express dialogue! I grew up reading novels and plays Inspector Lestrade and Holmes were speaking: — What’s up? — Not much — Cool.
Typographically speaking, it's really a separate kind of dash, a tad bit longer than an en dash. Nowadays it's more often set as an en dash, the em dash is a bit old fashioned for dialogue. But probably this differs between countries.