Em dash forever! Along with en dash for numerical ranges, true ellipsis not that three-period crap, true typographic quotes, and all the trimmings! Good typography whenever and wherever possible!
I am all for using proper typographic symbols, but it is unclear what place the precomposed ellipsis U+2026—what I assume you mean by “true ellipsis”—has in that canon, especially with the compressed form it takes in most fonts.
This is not the first treatise on this subject to make it to the hn front page.
The problem is, I don't recognise it has having ever been a big thing. I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes. Semi-colons are just as rare. I think both were always niche.
> The problem is, I don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.
This is not a problem. Or rather, it is not a problem in the way that I think you mean.
Em dashes do not need to be a big thing to be useful, which they are; they also do not need anyone's personal recognition to do their jobs.
The problem may, in fact, be that they used to be more of a niche punctuation mark that people were not very familiar with. Now that LLMs have fallen in love with them and throw them around like candy, if people have hardly ever seen them used in well-written text before, they might treat them alone as a much stronger signal for LLM generation than they should — which is precisely what is bringing em-dashes under fire these days, and hence results TFA.
So, yes, indeed, in some ways the problem is, that you don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.
I use semi-colons frequently, probably at least a half dozen times/week.
Em-dashes not so much, but I'm so deathly sick of people complaining that some piece of text must be LLM-generated that I feel the need to start using it as well.
The problem isn’t the em dashes, it’s the overuse of em dashes. Same for all the other ChatGPT-isms - they’re fine when used occasionally for effect, but there’s no variety. It’s always the same punctuation, same grammatical structures, same rhetorical moves, same paragraph lengths... That’s not what writing is supposed to be like and it becomes very grating after a while.
I love em dashes — they are just so pretty. But the en dash also needs more love. 1 out of every, say, 7–15 of the hyphens I see should be en dashes instead.
Argggh! Seeing “tell—tale sign” when it should be “tell-tale sign” is even worse! The point isn't to use punctuation, it's to use punctuation properly!
This use in dialogue is common in Continental European languages, especially Romance languages. I think it's also common in English among writers who were influenced by other European languages?
If you are surrounded by a class of people that makes you genuinely second-guess the optics of your (appropriate) em-dash usage, I think that tells you a lot about what you need to change in your life. Likely you'll be happier in the company of people who know how to pick up a professionally written book or article.
I've seen far more people complaining about people believing em dashes indicate AI, than people who actually believe that em dashes automatically indicate AI with no other evidence.
I keep being surprised this is such a big deal on HN, and I have begun to wonder whether this is just a uniquely American conversation.
I grew up among European and other international English speakers and writers, and no one blinks an eye at a semicolon or an em-dash. I'm not saying they use them frequently or overuse them, they simply know how to use them correctly and use them well. Writing without either is like ... cooking without garlic. You can, but it certainly makes affairs a lot more boring.
Now I understand that America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this all comes from, do you think?
> America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify
I think so. Strunk & White is distinctly American. You see simplicity encouraged by others, including Virgina Tufte (_Syntax as Style_), and her well-known son Edward Tufte.
When I was learning to write, em dashes were not even touched on. The idea that exotic punctuation could be required to express cogent thoughts in academia would get laughed out of the room.
> teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this comes from?
No. It comes from the fact that Americans are functionally illiterate and genuinely have no idea how to use or interpret em dashes or semicolons. They don't use them and don't expect anyone else to use them. The only time Americans see these punctuations are in the handful of classic books they're required to skim to pass high school English class.
I'm on vacation so don't have my copy of Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style at hand, but I'm not sure he would subscribe to this manifesto.
Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)
A weak judgment betrays itself in the indiscriminate use of fine punctuation; for when the em-dash is made universal, it ceases to be distinguished, and becomes merely another form of hyphen.
Let the em-dash remain upon the height of style. Let the hyphen toil in the shade of the valley. And let the en-dash—patient, capable, and unjustly overlooked—at last be admitted to polite society, where it may properly mediate matters of form–function.
I have been using the em dash in writing forever - in Word, for example, you type a word, then space-hyphen-space, then you type another word and the hyphen is autocorrected to an em dash.
I don’t regularly use en-dashes, cause I don’t know how to make them.
it’s usually space dash dash space across most word processors.
I picked up the habit a couple years ago of just undoing the autocorrect to an em dash and leaving it as two dashes to avoid accusations -- now it’s stuck with me
I've noticed people using emdashes more in known non-AI text in what I assume is a smokescreen to maintain plausible deniability when they wholesale copy AI text.
It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.
Most AI generated text doesn't seem to have spaces around the em dashes. I've been using that as a subtle distinguishing marker; as both forms are considered grammatically correct.
Huh, I've observed the opposite, AI-generated text uses spaces most of the time. Might depend on language? Style guides I use (like Chicago) don't put spaces between em dashes so those always stand out immediately to me.
These things are inescapable. In Nov 2019, I helped a friend move. I had a cold and not wanting to get her sick, I wore one of the N95 masks that I had so that I could bicycle in fire season.
By 2022, doing the same would be a political statement.
Yeah, for sure, but without easy way to access it from the keyboard, most don't bother wasting time inserting it.
Smart tools like LibreOffice and above indeed help with it, but in other scenarios, especially common browser usage that's not the case. Compose key is really useful for that, but it's not widely known outside of Linux.
This dates back to the beginning of the Mac, so it's almost 10 years older than FreeBSD. (I'm unfamiliar with other UNIX compose key tooling that may have predated it.)
I used em-dashes regularly. However, since they’ve become associated with LLM-generated text, I’ve stopped using them to avoid the appearance of AI assistance.
Can I have the a reverse filter, that replaces smart quotes, em-dashes and other web filth with something a proper compiler rightfully expects? Nothing like copying code samples from someone's blog, and getting weird errors because the helpful blog software made the typography “prettier“
LLMs completely ruined "—" for me, its not jus that it makes text look generated I think it revealed something deep about the use of it that was always really cringe and just has no reason to exist...
I used to use em-dashes online to seem smart but now that internet addicts are defending them in order to be contrarian about AI slop, I'm abandoning them altogether. I have to finally admit that I actually think they're stupid and I don't want tiny differences in the length of a featureless horizontal line to be grammatically significant.
Especially when there's never any context where you can create a minimal pair between two utterances that would give them a different meaning depending on which dash was used. An em-dash is just a stuck up en-dash. I even hate the terms "em-dash" and "en-dash" now, after the typographical snobbery that flooded the culture for about a decade after web fonts got invented and standardized. Frontend developers and web designers started getting big salaries and buying fancy wines and whiskies, so I had to hear the word "Helvetica" 50x a day.
Em dash forever! Along with en dash for numerical ranges, true ellipsis not that three-period crap, true typographic quotes, and all the trimmings! Good typography whenever and wherever possible!
Restored.
The problem is, I don't recognise it has having ever been a big thing. I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes. Semi-colons are just as rare. I think both were always niche.
They are more prevalent in nonfiction.
This is not a problem. Or rather, it is not a problem in the way that I think you mean.
Em dashes do not need to be a big thing to be useful, which they are; they also do not need anyone's personal recognition to do their jobs.
The problem may, in fact, be that they used to be more of a niche punctuation mark that people were not very familiar with. Now that LLMs have fallen in love with them and throw them around like candy, if people have hardly ever seen them used in well-written text before, they might treat them alone as a much stronger signal for LLM generation than they should — which is precisely what is bringing em-dashes under fire these days, and hence results TFA.
So, yes, indeed, in some ways the problem is, that you don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.
Em-dashes not so much, but I'm so deathly sick of people complaining that some piece of text must be LLM-generated that I feel the need to start using it as well.
Related and perhaps interesting: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/114730157688607856
When I was growing up, I saw plays also use it like this:
You just don't see em-dashes used like they used to -- and it shows!I believe I've also seen it in Spanish and Portuguese.
Now everyone asks me what AI I’m using
I grew up among European and other international English speakers and writers, and no one blinks an eye at a semicolon or an em-dash. I'm not saying they use them frequently or overuse them, they simply know how to use them correctly and use them well. Writing without either is like ... cooking without garlic. You can, but it certainly makes affairs a lot more boring.
Now I understand that America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this all comes from, do you think?
I think so. Strunk & White is distinctly American. You see simplicity encouraged by others, including Virgina Tufte (_Syntax as Style_), and her well-known son Edward Tufte.
When I was learning to write, em dashes were not even touched on. The idea that exotic punctuation could be required to express cogent thoughts in academia would get laughed out of the room.
No. It comes from the fact that Americans are functionally illiterate and genuinely have no idea how to use or interpret em dashes or semicolons. They don't use them and don't expect anyone else to use them. The only time Americans see these punctuations are in the handful of classic books they're required to skim to pass high school English class.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp#...
Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)
Let the em-dash remain upon the height of style. Let the hyphen toil in the shade of the valley. And let the en-dash—patient, capable, and unjustly overlooked—at last be admitted to polite society, where it may properly mediate matters of form–function.
I don’t regularly use en-dashes, cause I don’t know how to make them.
I picked up the habit a couple years ago of just undoing the autocorrect to an em dash and leaving it as two dashes to avoid accusations -- now it’s stuck with me
(Yes, of course the proclamation was written by Gemini. I gave it some guidance - that's it).
It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.
— drob518
tldr: use spaces around em dashes
By 2022, doing the same would be a political statement.
Compose + --- produces —
See all other combos in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
But who is using it without it in common scenarios?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
Smart tools like LibreOffice and above indeed help with it, but in other scenarios, especially common browser usage that's not the case. Compose key is really useful for that, but it's not widely known outside of Linux.
Also if you need ad-hoc bullets, just reach for option + 8.
• Like this.
The difficulty in accessing symbols like these is one of my (I'm sure correctable) hang-ups when using Linux — Arch, btw.
A few of the easier to remember:
option + 0 for degrees º
option + u for to place an umlaut over the next typed character (when it's a valid combination, anyway) ëüä
option + c for cedilla ç
A punctuation mark was “cringe”? Seriously? Is this middle school?
Especially when there's never any context where you can create a minimal pair between two utterances that would give them a different meaning depending on which dash was used. An em-dash is just a stuck up en-dash. I even hate the terms "em-dash" and "en-dash" now, after the typographical snobbery that flooded the culture for about a decade after web fonts got invented and standardized. Frontend developers and web designers started getting big salaries and buying fancy wines and whiskies, so I had to hear the word "Helvetica" 50x a day.