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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#301

Post by NuclearPM »

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…

> meta typographical treatments

Do you expect anyone to know what this means?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#302

Post by scoot »

WillAdams wrote: post #69
scoot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces I'm curious why? Kerning? Regardless, it sounds like a lot of work > but really should find a copy of the actual magazine.... Uh, "..." ;)

The big reason for manually constructing an ellipsis is to ensure consistent spacing for the 3 and 4 dot forms --- some typefaces will include both, but may not fit well if the type specs have the text set tight or loose. My apologies, should I have typed \thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.?

The four dot ellipses is for use in quoted text, although how it's used (if at all) depends on the style guide. As you weren't quoting anyone but simply indicating an incomplete thought of your own, a three dot ellipses is the correct form.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#303

Post by FabHK »

kimixa wrote: post #263
FabHK wrote: post #130

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).

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.

Ah, interesting, so em-dash without spaces really is more of a US convention. My LLM pushed back against that assumption of mine :-)

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#304

Post by Timwi »

Waterluvian wrote: post #114
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…

With HTML, I can do everything as a and the eyeball reader doesn't know/care. Where it matters is that I'm stripping semantic meaning, which hurts computers and possible accessibility devices. Most of my life, the same has been true about dashes. I use - for every one of the kinds you provided because - lives on my keyboard. Is there real value in caring? Does it have the same semantic—stripping effect for computers/…

The comment about your keyboard is ironic given the nerd forum we're in. The em and en dashes live on my keyboard alongside the hyphen because I'm a techie and I know how to put them there. My Android keyboard has them too and I didn't even need to put them there myself.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#305

Post by Timwi »

ransom1538 wrote: post #226
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…

em dash is awesome. I immediately know I am talking to a bot.

That's one way to telling us you don't read professional writing without telling us you don't read professional writing.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#306

Post by Timwi »

adverbly wrote: post #284
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That analogy is not accurate. To make it accurate, it would be like if there was only one store you could ever buy things from and that store had a limited number of shelves, and someone came along and wanted to use up one of the shelves that to sell an old tool that few people need, and they also only accepted a weird form of payment that would randomly cause issues with some people.

I think we're getting at the heart of your misunderstanding. You seem to feel that we're running out of codepoints in Unicode (the “limited number of shelves” analogy). This could not be further from the truth. Although the number of codepoints is technically finite, it is extremely large (over a million) compared to how many we need (currently only 160,000 are defined, and for obvious reasons the rate of new additions is slowing down). The Unicode roadmaps main page[0] displays only 5 of the 17 available planes because the remaining 12 (each 65,536 codepoints large) have not yet had any characters assigned to them whatsoever.

[0] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#307

Post by vonunov »

tavavex wrote: post #233

This 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 em dash (at least from an American perspective) is the "regular dash". Referring constantly to the "em dash" is a new thing; in my experience, it used to be understood that "dash" by default referred to the function/role of the punctuation mark that in America we format as an em dash, and that in the UK they (mostly) format as a spaced en dash. You have that function formatted as a hyphen: a dash in the abstract but not typographically.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#308

Post by Timwi »

cm11 wrote: post #186
jerf wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also shouldn't forget the Eminem dash: –—–. Recommended for use in censoring words in rap songs.

—–—, I believe.

That depends. Your interpretation is “em+en+em”. But another, potentially wittier interpretation is “em in em”, i.e., you split an em-dash into two en-dashes and put an em-dash inside.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#309

Post by ComputerPerson »

wahern wrote: post #276
Helmut10001 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find myself using semicolons excessively in my communication with LLMs. Those and nested parenthesis. I do this mostly to avoid having to restructure my words; my thought patterns are accurately reflected, and the machines have no trouble with lispish structure.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#310

Post by vova_hn2 »

walkerbrown wrote: post #99
usui wrote: post #77

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.

I’m curious, what is the objection to Han unification?

If I'm writing a text about Russian language in English, I can easily include an example in Russian: "привет, как дела?" and it will be displayed correctly.

But, if I was writing about Mandarin Chinese in Japanese, I just wouldn't be able to do it using a simple text input (like HN comment form). I would need more advanced formatting tools to make sure that both Chinese and Japanese characters are displayed correctly.

Because, as far a I understand, one Unicode symbol could correspond to both a Hanzi character and a Kanji character. Which character will be displayed is only determined by font. Since HN doesn't allow me to select different fonts for different parts of my comment, it is simply impossible to create a comment that includes both Japanese and Chinese characters.

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