Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 330 posts

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#311

Post by j7ake »

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.

Some of the best writers, such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce, might disagree with short sentences.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#312

Post by koolala »

uberman wrote: post #36
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 would always prefer to do: " There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and, guess what, parentheses are right there for you. "

That might lead to a lisp singularity.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#313

Post by koolala »

readread wrote: post #115
thfuran wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think parenthesis are ideal for a parenthetical aside.

I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer. I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks lik…

hmmm... three or fewer?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#314

Post by koolala »

helboi4 wrote: post #271
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.

why?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#316

Post by jerf »

Timwi wrote: post #308
cm11 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

—–—, 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.

Heh, thanks for the attempted recovery but I definitely meant the other way around.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#317

Post by nicwolff »

thefringthing wrote: post #203
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…

> 5.2.1 Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens – to set off phrases." – Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

I have done this for years – it looks much better to me than an em dash – so it's nice to have some authority to cite!

Especially unspaced—this is just way too close—I can't even read it.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#318

Post by bccdee »

anonthrownaway wrote: post #90
ryandrake wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?

Wrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).

The vast majority of readers can tell the difference between - and —. It's very noticeable. This sentence:

> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash.

is noticeably weird-looking. Even a spaced en-dash looks a bit small; a spaced hyphen is just odd. But if you type it like this:

> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time—proper dashes, though, not hyphens.

it becomes much more conventional and legible. If you're going to use hyphens, it's better to admit the typewriter convention and use two, like so:

> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time -- I just use the standard keyboard hyphen, but twice.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#319

Post by bccdee »

I've turned against them, partly because they're too flexible. Many of the things a dash does can be done better by more specific forms of punctuation like semicolons, colons, or brackets, which give your sentence a clearer visual structure.

It's also easy to get too used to dashes and start sticking them in places where they don't belong. If you're using a coordinate conjunction like "and" or "but," a dash is awkward and redundant. "A period is great to express a complete thought — and it shifts the register of the next letter," can more easily be "a complete thought, and it shifts" or "a complete thought — it shifts."

Dashes take up a lot of space. Like exclamation points, they draw the eye. Does the eye really need to be drawn to "a complete thought; it shifts"? If you let them, dashes will replace all your other punctuation marks, and your writing will become a soup of horizontal lines. Dashes are a sometimes food.

Post reply on HN