Appositives are my favorite.
Em dashes are amazing
241–250 of 330 posts
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#242I don't like them, I don't like text editors changing the literal text that I type. I think we should just use double dash -- instead.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
Check this out 𒐫
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#244It annoys me that recently people seem to propagate the wrong use of em dashes. There is no space—an em dash is practically never typeset with spacing. You use an en dash in European typesetting – they have spaces, which your typesetting system hopefully adjusts to sane values. They're not like the spaces between words. At least, that's how I learned it. Everyone seems to disagree and write em dashes with spaces nowa…
Agreed that it (used to be) less common. AP style (like the article mentioned) uses spaced em dashes, and I think that style of spaced em dashes are more common in writing today because that's what Claude (particularly Sonnet) likes to use (based on some half-baked investigation I did a bit ago [^1]). OpenAI models generally uses the American-style unspaced em dashes, which is why that particular style looks LLM-y to people now.
edit: Another comment recommended https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash which does an awesome job of diving into dash usage by style guide
[^1]: https://will-keleher.com/posts/your-dashes-suggest-which-mod...
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#245Can't help it. I like em dashes in works of fiction (e.g., C.J. Cherryh); I also find em dashes improve technical writing (for me).
Sometimes adding spaces around em dashes is not about preference, but helpful due to the font, or the device, you're reading on. At some zoom-levels, for example, an em dash may bump into an italicized word unless there's a bit of extra space.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#246Another AI slop post — so hot these days.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. No, with AI it's because it's MUCH faster than evaluating substance, and fast ways to weed out AI slop are desparately needed, since it can be produced so quickly.
It's also infinitely more error-prone. All form-based heuristics are horrible for detecting AI because the one thing AI is damn near perfect at is writing like an actual human. It's the thing it was trained to do. The entire decades-old architecture has exited for specifically that purpose. That second "L" in "LLM" is "language" for a reason.
Yes, but the desparate need is specifically for quick and easy ways to detect AI. If it's error-prone that's unfortunate, but better than nothing. A slow, laborious way, on the other hand, is useless because it doesn't achieve the goal of reducing the workload.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#248(We don't particularly have anything against profanity but here it seemed gratuitous so I've taken fucking out of the title above.)
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#249I'm reminded of a remark I read somewhere that the em dash is "almost excessively versatile."
> As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash
All that energy spent on punctuation, and still: comma splices. ):
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#250This post only makes the case for em dashes from a writing and expression point of you. But it misses why people now distrust em dashes - it's not about sentence structure or expression, it's the symbol itself. 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…
The internet convention in the 90s used to be two dashes for the en-dash character and three dashes for em-dash character. You used a space-dash-space notation that is easy to decipher but the typical dashes variants dont have spaces around them. When I read a text message I dont expect careful typography—in a book or an article I want perfection.
More importantly though, the em-dash-in-a-sentence construct is a way of thinking and the notation is of lesser importance than the way to express oneself. I dont think the current distrust is from the symbol: the LLMs love em dashes for the same reasons many of us do, and, perhaps better than most of us, they have no trouble using the correct symbol.