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RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

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Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#91

Post by LoganDark »

thewebguyd wrote: post #38
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…

Related, I've seen a lot of misidentification of Aspie writing as being LLM-generated lately. You seem Aspie to me (and parent does as well) so it makes sense that you'd also see the similarity.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#92

Post by atlbeer »

wpollock wrote: post #77
orthogonal_cube wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t tell. I struggle with such subtleties. I probably should’ve checked ‘454545’ in the ascii table. Seeing how it translates to ‘---‘ could’ve hinted towards that, but the clever use probably would’ve been applauded instead without thinking it was a joke. Ah well. Egg on my face I suppose.

RFCs have four digit numbers. This will likely change within a month or so; RFC 9945 was recently assigned so it won't be long. I wonder what RFC9999 and RFC10000 will be?

RFC9999 obviously should be to propose RFCs having 5 digits

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#93

Post by ssl-3 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #28
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 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 understanding. Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for? Together with footnotes, I've always used them like that, but I guess it could also be just a cultural differenc…

Punctuation in written English can be used in many ways. It's a very flexible language.

It is perfectly OK (it really is) to use parentheses -- and emdashes alike -- where they're useful; other punctuation like the semicolon, the comma, and even the Oxford comma are also OK.

There's not much that is disallowed in English. Most people have no reason to adhere to any particularly-rote style guide.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#94

Post by ritlo »

dudu24 wrote: post #63

Hot take: I think the em-dash is just lazy punctuation that can be replaced by the more nuanced pauses, i.e. the comma, semicolon, and colon. I think its popularity stems from people being confused on how to use a semicolon.

I never use them to replace a comma, certainly, and only rarely a colon.

I find parenthesis often awkward or too heavy, so may use the m-dash to replace those. Especially if what might have been a parenthetical is going to terminate a sentence, an m-dash is much cleaner, as it doesn't need a closing mark, and a terminating paren right before a period looks awful. For long potential-parentheticals that do terminate before the end of the sentence, the m-dash takes up more visual space and marks the beginning and end more-visibly, making for easier scanning. One ought probably re-write to avoid parenthetical statements most of the time in the first place, when there's time, but sometimes they're desirable for stylistic reasons, or just because one lacks the time to improve a draft.

I also use it as a "classier" version of the ellipsis. It doesn't replace every use, but it replaces very-casual, colloquial use of that mark as a kind of harder-comma. Looks much better, I think, and serves the same purpose.

As for the semicolon, I'd never shy away from the semicolon when I can get away with it, but use them rarely nonetheless. I don't think I ever replace them with the m-dash, though. As inline list separators they're great and an m-dash would be an awful replacement, while as soft-periods, they're fine, though most of the time I just use a full period—but not an m-dash, not if a semicolon could have worked.

I do think they're more at-home in, say, fiction than technical writing, but I like having them in my toolbox in any case.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#96

Post by ssl-3 »

JCattheATM wrote: post #85
orthogonal_cube wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good writing doesn't have mad tangents anyway, there should be a flow and natural transition. In general, yes. Technical documents, research reports, news articles, and other formal publications should follow this. Anything else which allows a bit more freedom in expression? I’d say it’s a matter of taste.

I had freewritten, generally free expression type documents in mind when I wrote my statement, e.g. blog articles or opinion pieces. The problem is 'a matter of taste' can be used to excuse/justify anything.

That's more of a feature than it is a problem.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#97

Post by ssl-3 »

wpollock wrote: post #77
orthogonal_cube wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t tell. I struggle with such subtleties. I probably should’ve checked ‘454545’ in the ascii table. Seeing how it translates to ‘---‘ could’ve hinted towards that, but the clever use probably would’ve been applauded instead without thinking it was a joke. Ah well. Egg on my face I suppose.

RFCs have four digit numbers. This will likely change within a month or so; RFC 9945 was recently assigned so it won't be long. I wonder what RFC9999 and RFC10000 will be?

I'm probably neither creative- nor connected-enough to do it myself, but somebody should see to it that either RFC9999 or RFC10000 is funny as hell and lands on April 1st.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#98

Post by tiahura »

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…

It’s used all the time in legal writing. The backlash seems like something out of idiocracy.

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#99

Post by vova_hn2 »

oxygen_crisis wrote: post #69
vova_hn2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiously enough, after telling it "your code is broken, can you find the mistake?" it was able to correct the code: def replace_em_dash(text: str) -> str: """ +-------------------+ | ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) | +-------------------+ """ return text.replace("—", "\U00010EAD\U00010EAC")

Might be a good idea in general to throw out a few preventative iterations of "Your code is broken, can you find the mistake?" before you even bother reading its initial output

But if there's no mistake, it may change something unrelated and break something else...

Re: RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

#100

Post by johnea »

I don't see how a new unicode point solves anything.

What stops any generated text from using this codepoint versus the existing em dash codepoint?

I find the punctuation annoying, mostly because the dashes are routinely used without a space on each side. Thus making the text look hyphenated.

The comma serves the same purpose and is superior in every way.

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