I miss being able to use em dashes and not be accused of being a robot.
Em dashes are amazing
261–270 of 330 posts
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#262You 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.
You also shouldn't forget the Eminem dash: –—–. Recommended for use in censoring words in rap songs.
––– — — — –––
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#263Author 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…
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).
A spaced en-dash is also commonly used in British english for the parenthesis equivalent. So it's not really "anglosphere".
While there's no central authority, both Oxford and Cambridge University press style guidelines recommend that.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#264Author 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…
> - dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley) That's a hyphen, and (to be pedantic) style guides usually do not consider it a dash. There's also the 2-em dash in some style guides for redacting words, and since care needs to be taken to avoid a line wrap between the em dashes, Unicode has a character for it: ⸺ Finally, > - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — ) This use is sometimes discouraged by style guides, an…
The advantage of the em dash is that it can replace pretty much any other punctuation mark and work well enough. Quite often I'll be trying to remember whether to use a semicolon or a colon to connect two parts of a sentence, and then I decided I can't be bothered and just use a dash instead - it'll be fine.
I think this is the real reason for its (pre-LLM) ubiquity - it's a really flexible, versatile bit of punctuation, whereas most of its siblings have a more specific meaning or purpose.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#265Re: Em dashes are amazing
#266Author 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.
At a Denny's once, I received a kid's menu with a blurb purporting to reveal the trendy new slang words kids were using. I read with interest, but found only contrived nonces like "sloovy." As a kid I could tell that this menu was fake news.
Ceasing the happy tradition of using the hyphen between equal-weighted nouns because of a hacker news comment is the moral equivalent of adopting expletives from the kids menu at a diner.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#267About 15-20 years ago the em dash became popular in the Russian web-design community because, surprisingly, it is the proper character to use. Using "-" was a sign of low-quality work. I remember I even wrote a small app in C#, so I could have it on the screen, click a button, and get "—", "«" or "»" in the clipboard ("«" and "»" also mattered, because " is not really a legitimate character in Russian typography).
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#268em dashes are the best thing to track if the content is AI written, lol
Nope. The best tell isn't any single given character, but the general flow of the prose. I find "it's not X - it's Y" or "No X. No Y. Just Z and W." to be stronger tells than the mere presence of emdashes. Hell, overuse of emoji is more of a tell than the mere presence of emdashes. The problem here is really "AI detection" services that themselves use AI to perform the service. More than one person has fed pre-AI tex…
using AI to detect AI - doesn't make sense to me
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. The best tell isn't any single given character, but the general flow of the prose. I find "it's not X - it's Y" or "No X. No Y. Just Z and W." to be stronger tells than the mere presence of emdashes. Hell, overuse of emoji is more of a tell than the mere presence of emdashes. The problem here is really "AI detection" services that themselves use AI to perform the service. More than one person has fed pre-AI tex…
using AI to detect AI - doesn't make sense to me
This type of AI usage is quite a good tell on personal laziness - whatever we can do to minimize the human fault state, even if that fault state is also baked into generative AI because it was invented by humans.
People have been running from their origins for decades. To me, this desire to "take human fault" out of the picture via AI is no different than centuries of people insisting that humans are separate from and not part of nature, even though our bodies run under the same physical and biological rules that all of nature does, and that is unavoidable. Objective reality only exists as an underpinning. Nothing that lives on this planet can ever perceive that reality without involving their own personal bias, and so it exists with the same relevance as an Earth-style planet even five lightyears away with an active civilization (if such a thing exists). I think that value might even be generous. There could be such a civilization a single lightyear away, and we'd never be able to reach them without a generational vessel designed to support at least one generation of explorers dying, and relying on their children (or grandchildren) to see it home.
Re: Em dashes are amazing
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley) That's a hyphen, and (to be pedantic) style guides usually do not consider it a dash. There's also the 2-em dash in some style guides for redacting words, and since care needs to be taken to avoid a line wrap between the em dashes, Unicode has a character for it: ⸺ Finally, > - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — ) This use is sometimes discouraged by style guides, an…
The advantage of the em dash is that it can replace pretty much any other punctuation mark and work well enough. Quite often I'll be trying to remember whether to use a semicolon or a colon to connect two parts of a sentence, and then I decided I can't be bothered and just use a dash instead - it'll be fine. I think this is the real reason for its (pre-LLM) ubiquity - it's a really flexible, versatile bit of punctuat…
The best advice is often: Use a dot and start a new sentence. The best writers use very short sentences in a row and simple words. They flow easily and do not break reading. This works particularly well in science and for difficult topics.