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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#321

Post by keane »

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…

Butterick’s probably serves as the canonical online resource for that: https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#323

Post by lesostep »

lesostep wrote: post #110
ryukoposting wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. They also use em dashes to repeat a word with emphasis, something that is done much better with parentheses and italics. > And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause. > And also occasionally (occasionally) one just needs a random dramatic pause. I know which one I'd rather read. Though, frankly, I'd prefer neither and I'm trying to remove this kind of thing from my own writing…

I can't be the only one that reads those two examples very differently. In a first example, the second "occasionally" is stressed, when in second example it feels almost whispered.

It's really hard to find style guides on reading specifically.

But what I see from trawling the posts made by narrators, a lot of them do mention that em-dashes are read as interruptions with sudden tonal shift, while cursive implies a non-interuptive tonal shift.

That said, apparently, most audiobook authors actually supplement their own guidance on how to read their books. I haven't found any universal guide yet.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#324

Post by OrangeMusic »

sheept wrote: post #173
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…

> - 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…

There's also a triple m dash: ⸻.

Its only use is to make fun of LLMs.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#325

Post by xigoi »

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.

Where do you think the bots learned it from?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#326

Post by brachkow »

In Eastern Europe, a lot of computer-savvy people write with em dashes. I see two reasons behind that:

1. There is a highly popular Cyrillic keyboard layout with an em dash made by design educator Ilya Birman – https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout.

2. His colleague, Maxim Ilyahov is the author of an extremely popular book on writing good copy. Somehow, this book was a bestseller for years and was read by all kinds of common folk. I once saw a janitor reading it on a break!

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#327

Post by cm11 »

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.

Nice, that's good.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#328

Post by hollandheese »

pohl wrote: post #256
hollandheese wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Em dashes are hardly ever used in modern literature. Sure, it's a tell that people aren't reading late 18th century to early 20th century literature, but that's not the same as not being big readers.

That’s an extraordinary claim.

Not nearly as extraordinary as yours.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#330

Post by cainxinth »

>As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together.

A semicolon is more than a comma but less than a colon. It's for when I want to use a comma, but it would be grammatically incorrect to.

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