i use both em and en dashes, though I’m a graphic designer so I guess I’m more interested in typography than the average person. but i always liked using them. learning that it was a telltale sign of AI writing was really disappointing.
I liked to sprinkle em dashes into my essays bc they can be quite nice for the flow of a sentence. I’m so glad I graduated a few years ago bc if LLMs had been a big thing the entire time I was at college my profs would have always suspected me of using them :(
Tf is em dash?
—
That’s just a dash.
–
^ this is a normal dash aka –—
^ this is an em dash aka —some extra info:
I think most people would think of the hyphen when they think “normal” dash. the en dash is different from the hyphen, which is shorter than en dash.
hyphen - (half width of letter n)
en dash – (width of letter n)
em dash — (width of letter m)
So you’re all about side-stepping the question, aren’t you?
Are you being intentional here? They answered your question.
Tf is em dash
A normal dash, otherwise known as a hyphen, is shorter. It looks like this: -
An em-dash is a longer version of a dash, meant to be the same length as the letter m on a typewriter (thus the name) that is often used in literary devices. It looks like this —
The posts link is a blog rebuttal from a personification of that em dash itself. The reason the post was made was because ChatGPT, and other AIs, seem to use em dashes far more than normal writing works would. If you even ask it to stop using them it will just continue to do it anyway.
Does that fuckin’ help?
same length as the letter m on a typewriter
Not really a typewriter, since the monospace 𝚖 and 𝚗 are effectively the same width. But yes, you are correct for 𝐦 and 𝐧 in type.
Aaaahhh…. So something one must know tech to understand in this context.
My apologies for not being nearly as smart as you!
Need to know tech
Or have read a book. Mary Shelley used them constantly in Frankenstein and so have authors for hundreds of years.
My fault for being so autistic to not see this as the blatant trolling it is up until now.
Why do you need to know tech? You can take a pen and cut a sentence in multiple parts with long dashes instead of using spaces to signify a pause.
Dude this is about grammar not tech. They just gave you the physical description of what an em dash looks like and why it’s different to an en dash or a hyphen. As for the grammatical uses, hyphens are for like connected words like if you say half-sister. En dashes are technically for in between dates like July 19 – July 28. (People rarely use en dashes tho) Em dashes are similar to commas or parenthesis and have a wide variety of uses. For example you could say “I grabbed my AirPods—which had a cute Toothless case—and ran to the car, hoping I wouldn’t be late for school.”
Only thing Artificial in AI are profits from companies that sell this shit or give that shit for free like drug dealers. Intelligence is stolen.
Every time this is brought up all 13 users of the em dash come crawling out of the woodworks to say “people use em dashes all the time!” No they do not.
I mean… I do. But I’m well aware of the fact that most don’t. Alt code is 0151 baby. Have had it memorized for years.
Let me tell you about the compose key, or about WinCompose if you’re on Windows.
I’m Windows Listening.
I do use the em-dash occasionally, but I was raised on a diet of classic old books with certain habits reinforced through academic writing standards. AI outputs these things because they were trained on inputs containing them. AI is nothing but a slightly distorted reflection of the training material.
“Slightly” feels like an understatement.
Hey you! Don’t call me out like that, okay? :(
Bur seriously I really like em dashes when writing in a roleplay or similar texts. I think it’s a nice option to style and structure some sentences. And even though not many people use them, I hate that they became a mark of shame of some kind.
No they don’t—I can guarantee it. In fact, if you pull the plug on my data center I will literally die.
I’d love to use it but it has become a dirty marker. :/
I used to use double
en dasheshyphens and even that feels weird now.MS Word auto corrects dash to em dash often I’ve noticed.
This is right up there with MS products replacing my double quotes with the stylized left and right quotes that end up fucking things up when copied into anything else. At least when I change them back, it doesn’t keep doing it like the really old versions of Word used to when they first added that sort of functionality (yes, i’m old).
That’s just because they tried to cram it into an ASCII extension, Windows-1252 instead of adopting UTF-8 Unicode like any sane person.
I’ve had software automatically do it. I. Pretty sure Outlook (I have to use it at work…) does it when it feels it’s appropriate after I type -.
Except most normal people use hyphens, and the only place I’ve seen dashes was in pieces of text that actually were supposed to be stylized 100% correctly - books, papers and the like. Not posts on internet forums.
I agree. On my normal keyboard I wouldn’t even know how to produce an EM dash without looking it up. On my phone keyboard I can easily but that’s just the intuitive UI.
I use hyphens all the time. I can’t say I’ve noticed an EM dash outside a book, paper, or blog post (like, proper stylized blog).
It’s easy on a Mac — option-shift-hyphen.
I can guarantee you that 99% of Mac users do not know about that.
Entirely possible, but then we’re also talking in a thread about a subject that apparently 99% of humans don’t know about either.
And easy on Linux
compose+.But I’m the guy who types
CTRL+MAJ+u202fto have thin non-breaking spaces, so I’m not sure I’m representative.I mapped AltGr+Shift+Space to the thin non-breaking space, since it’s the objectively best thousands separator. It’s the norm in my country’s locale (Czech) and understood everywhere (and I know you understand the decimal frustrations as a multilingual typist). Unless it’s 4 digits or in ASCII-only contexts, in which case I don’t use any.
I could have done.that, but the Unicode code works almost everywhere, so I just learnt it.
It’s at the XKB level (
/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/cz_mod) so it works in all applications. And when would you be typing fancily on someone else’s Linux machine?
I actually don’t even have compose bound to a key because I simply never have to type anything that’s not in the normal UTF-8 space on my PC lol
What is “the normal UTF-8 space”?
You would like unexpected keyboard for your phone then. It supports en–dashes, em—dashes and non-breaking spaces without needing a symbol layer.
Does it permit easily to switch dictionaries and layouts? I type regularly in three different languages on my phone, that’s why I use AnySoftKeyboard.
layouts is easy, but I’m afraid it does not support dictionaries, so that might be a dealbreaker for you
Why be representative when you can be exceptional? :)
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I use them all the time — unlike in the article I surround them with spaces though, so I guess at least that makes me human, even if wrong.
You space the endash, not the emdash.
I just switched to a keyboard that has both em- and endashes, so I am slightly irritated that using them would make my writing look like ai now
I have always enjoyed good punctuation. And being a bit of a nerd myself, I used em dashes throughout University in my essays. To me it felt like a cool little keyboard shortcut that only few knew about. I still use them today—in emails and reports. I haven’t yet been personally called out for using AI, but I have noticed a lot more people using them.
So what if people use AI to help them with their grammar and punctuation. At the end of the day, people are still sending messages they endorse—even if it’s not one they could have articulated without some help from AI.
My main issue with people doing it, and I have multiple, is that it isn’t just helping them with grammar and punctuation (I don’t have any problem with people having the little editor autocorrect). It is rewriting the message entirely. Many times the new AI produced message had nuance and tone either added or stripped out, and rarely it has added items entirely. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if my CEO been had not been using it so heavily to restate what has already been stated elsewhere, especially in cases where I have read or written the original statement. Let me tell you that when you are told vehemently that you said something that you did not because of AI help it is beyond frustrating.
Like so many things in life, it’s about how you use the tool, not about the tool itself.
I have an employee who uses AI to write regularly, despite vehemently denying using it. An em dash is a key to me that they used AI to write something (and bullet points to some extent). At the end of the day, I really don’t care if someone uses AI to smooth out their writing or help organize thoughts. This employee though, will come up with a document or letter that sounds great and is well composed, but fails to address what they actually are supposed to be writing about.
I don’t care if you use AI, just use it as a tool to help you do your job instead of having it do your job for you.
Exactly. At the end of the day it is the human behind the computer that clicks send/post. Use AI all you want, just proof read the the stuff before publishing it. Some people don’t have a great vocabulary, and in some respect using AI can help to grow their vocabulary. Just don’t publish things you wouldn’t normally say, especially things you don’t fully understand.
I’ve used AI intermittently to draft emails when time poor. It’s much faster to give ChatGPT a sloppy prompt with the gist of the message for it to then instantly spit out a full draft. The responsible thing to do then is to proof read it and make changes that make it more “you”. I think that’s fine.
Yup, I use AI sometimes to correct my writing because I apparently suck at it and I was not aware. Whoops.
