231–240 of 330 posts
LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.
Everyone unintentionally telling on themselves as not being big readers.
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 e…
I have a question to all em dash users reading this - why wouldn't I just use a regular dash in place of the normal full-length character? I have already done this several times in this very comment, and it's a very common convention on the internet. Outside publishing and other types of very high-brow writing, the fifty different variations of dashes with minor differences in length are pretty pointless, in my opinion. There's almost no scenarios where you need to make a distinction between them, what could possibly be misinterpreted because of dash length? So why not just use the regular, standard dash everywhere?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
I checked a message from my last chat with Claude
> Noted for this conversation — though worth flagging
and that's an em-dash (unicode 0x2014)
Endorsed. This post gets my vote. Two thumbs up vote.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-...
I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994, sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.
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…
Fun fact! Where a compound term is formed by joining two nouns of equal importance — such as Sarbanes–Oxley or attorney–client privilege — an en-dash, not a hyphen, should be used.
If you are at all interested in punctuation---and especially the em-dash---I highly recommend Nicholson Baker's essay "Survival of the Fittest" in the NYRB: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-... I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994 , sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.
I have always loved—and used—the em-dash [...] ;)
If you are at all interested in punctuation---and especially the em-dash---I highly recommend Nicholson Baker's essay "Survival of the Fittest" in the NYRB: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-... I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994 , sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.
> I have always loved---and used---the em-dash [...] I have always loved—and used—the em-dash [...] ;)