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RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

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Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#31

Post by AStrangeMorrow »

PTOB wrote: post #23

Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents. AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit. I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming. At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added th…

I know, I find myself in this silly situation where I have to adjust my writing style because I write like an AI: always loved my bullet points and dashes.

At work I also always tended to send slightly longer but structured answers. I found that it allowed to skip over the irrelevant sections and focus on what the changes are. Eg a list of changes with in the format -> bullet point -> change name -> change details. So people could easily focus on changes they cared about. Instead of a dense paragraph that people often just skip.

Hell I even found myself wanting to add a typo just to give a more human fell, or skip final “.” to make my text imperfect and more human. That’s getting silly

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#32

Post by torben-friis »

Someone1234 wrote: post #25
Retr0id wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's emphatically not what it claims.

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... So if EM-Dash is good proof of AI usage, and people who we can see didn't use AI / or predate AI being popular, are flagged, then that undercuts it by a lot.

>Top 50 users by number of posts containing em dashes (—) before November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT was released

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#34

Post by pmyteh »

716dpl wrote: post #20

A simpler solution may be to use an en dash, even though they are not interchangeable and em dashes are the proper punctuation for parenthetical phrases. As a typography pedant, I’m annoyed that LLMs have forced us to talk about this.

I think this is more of a style issue than one of correctness: lots of high-quality typeset output has used em dashes for parenthetical phrasing and plenty has used (spaced) en dashes. Bringhurst is a partisan for the en dash, for example, saying that "The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for the best text faces." (/Elements/ version 2.5, p.80).

Of course, if we collectively shifted to the spaced en dash then LLMs would eventually follow; it's not clear to me that any simple and deliberate sign of humanity could remain exclusive given the incentives for machines to replicate it.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#35

Post by dathinab »

PTOB wrote: post #23

Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents. AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit. I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming. At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added th…

never understood why -- => em-dash auto completion is only a think in some subset of application instead of being a standard behavior for (display) text inputs

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#37

Post by dghf »

716dpl wrote: post #20

A simpler solution may be to use an en dash, even though they are not interchangeable and em dashes are the proper punctuation for parenthetical phrases. As a typography pedant, I’m annoyed that LLMs have forced us to talk about this.

Modern British style tends to prefer spaced en dashes over tight-set em dashes for parenthetical phrases.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#38

Post by thewebguyd »

orthogonal_cube wrote: post #21

> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understandin…

> especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence

Well that explains a lot. Interestingly enough, I've found that I naturally write like an LLM, or rather the LLMs write like I did. I wonder how many other patterns we attribute to LLMs are common in neurodivergent writing just as a result of so much of the training data being areas of the internet where I'd imagine neurodivergence is overrepresented vs. the general population.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#39

Post by wavemode »

orthogonal_cube wrote: post #21

> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understandin…

I was always taught that overuse of the em-dash is poor style. Oftentimes using more specific punctuation (comma, semicolon, colon, parentheses) more clearly communicates the structure of a thought. Em-dashes are a lot more freeform and informal. They communicate a similar tone as when you're speaking and you suddenly stop to mention something that just occurred to you.

In this sense, the idea that "em-dash = AI" has become something of a strawman. The mere presence of em-dashes isn't what indicates AI, it's the fact that LLMs use them so frequently, and use them for formal structure (where another punctuation mark would work better) rather than informal breaking up of related thoughts.

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