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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#271

Post by helboi4 »

koolala wrote: post #12

Test: '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 comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.' I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the sam…

I think you demonstrated exactly why avoiding em dashes like the plague makes for hard to read sentences.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#272

Post by teach »

onraglanroad wrote: post #227
DonHopkins wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three-em dashes are multinational conglomerate punctuation. They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape. In German, nouns have gender, so why not more inclusive punctuation?…

> They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape. Triple emdash cannot be used as a lubricant. Do not touch, inhale, or look at triple emdash. Do not taunt triple emdash.

May stick to certain types of skin

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#273

Post by babypuncher »

douglee650 wrote: post #72

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…

I still don't see the actual point, as the meaning of the dash is already clear from the context around them. The em dash is surrounded by spaces, the en dash is surrounded by numbers, and the hyphen is used in compound words. A single character, the one that already exists on my keyboard, works fine for all three.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#274

Post by card_zero »

palmotea wrote: post #255
TehCorwiz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old? Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents. So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly…

> So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save ti…

I don't even know how to make that factoid work. It must require that the bar on an f is separate and removable, so that an f can be used as long s.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#275

Post by midnightbobarun »

mahoho wrote: post #82

Since before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dat…

Same here. Long before ChatGPT existed, I always associated em dashes with pretentious writers who chose style over substance, mostly as their writing had no real substance. That AI makes em dashes a faux pas in these days... it brings me a little joy.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#276

Post by wahern »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #270
MrJohz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the best writers today, and aesthetically the baseline expectation. But I personally like the older em dash and semicolon laden styles that used a greater diversity of forms to weave thoughts together.

A stream of short sentences often feels lazy, reductive, and tedious. But it is more forgiving--you can't fail if you don't try. And it inflates word count, similar to verbose Java vs compact Perl.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#277

Post by Aloisius »

treetalker wrote: post #97
douglee650 wrote: post #72

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.

This isn't universal.

The New York Times Manual of Style, for instance, only permits using an en dash as a minus sign. Joining nouns like Sarbanes-Oxley and even number ranges use hyphens instead.

The BBC News Style Guide and the Economist Style Guide similarly use hyphens in place of en dashes - though sometimes BBC seems to use en dashes in place of em dashes.

The University of Cambridge Style Guide simply says to avoid dashes altogether.

The AMA Manual of Style explicitly declares that one should hyphenate two or more nouns of equal importance. They however continue to use the en dash when the first word in the compound modifies more than one word (e.g. anti–Norwalk virus).

The US General Printing Office Style Guide also uses hyphens, so the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is hyphenated in documents published by Congress.

The Chicago Manual of Style nearly got rid of the en dash as well, but backtracked after backlash.

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