Em dash is good punctuation and I won’t let you philistines take it away from me.
Right. It is used in books often. Maybe people don’t read?
That’s different, the AI can’t generate paper. /s
You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.
I liked using em dashes, but now I’ve stopped. I’m ecen less likely to fix minor spelling and grammatical errors that I otherwise would’ve, because at least it will be easier to recognize a human behind the comment or post.
Also, signing my name like this helps too: ,.),.)==============D~~~~~~~
I refuse to stop using en dashes. I’ve been using them because they are good typography, and the fact that clankers got clued in to that doesn’t make it wrong.
You can still have the same function using a hyphen. How do you even type an em dash on a standard keyboard?
Compose - -
I assume compose is meant to be a key? What key is compose?
The Compose key.
If you don’t have a compose key, well, you should have one. You can define it easily in the Kde control center. I suppose there’s the equivalent in Gnome.
It was introduced by Sun. It’s very convenient.
Classy
I use en- and em-dashes religiously in my LaTeX documents, and I’m not going to start using the wrong kind of dash on purpose. Might as well abandon grammar while we’re at it.
I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.
The only autocorrect I liked because I have no clue how to manually insert an em-dash otherwise
There were a couple years where spelling/ grammar checks where it would always correct like half of the regular dashes id use into em dashes, and id have to copy an email dash after I spell checked, then ctrl +f all the regular dashes and replace them with the coppied em dash
On MacOS:
Opt+Shift+-En dash is the same without the shift
En dash isn’t the hyphen-minus and is not on the keyboard. It’s a separate kind of dash, typically used for ranges like ‘1939–45’.
I’ve been using them for a long time, as they are also used in German typography like em dashes in English typography – only surrounded by spaces. They are easy to type on a Linux or MacOS keyboards layout (E.g.
Opt+-)TIL, thanks
Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.
There was a recent podcast episode by 99% Invisible defending the em-dash
It seems that its usage in AI generated text increased after feeding the AI lots of 19th century literature, which seems to have been its previous peak usage. I don’t hate it - it can make text more legible by breaking it up into smaller chunks. It’s an oversimplification to automatically discount any text with an em-dash as AI generated.
If you can’t read a fucking em dash —already a commonly-used punctuation mark— without thinking the author must be AI, then you are both insufficiently trained —either in grammar or in how to use your own keyboard— and bad at identifying AI responses.
99 Pi did a decent podcast on it recently, pretty interesting how far back it’s usage goes, and how prevalent it was at different times in history.
I don’t care, I’m not giving up the em-dash in my own writing. Good luck reading half of my run-on sentences without it~~~
I like using an en dash (–) separated by spaces instead
I use em dashes - assuming that’s what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I’m definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don’t rewrite me again, Elon! I’ve learned from you since last time. Listen: “White power! White power! White power!”
EM dashes are specifically the — long ones, while - is simply a dash; the former can’t usually be found on physical keyboards, you have to jump through a few hoops in order to “type” them, but LLMs are not limited by physical keyboards.
However, some people do jump through these hoops — I use EM dashes whenever I’m typing on my phone because they’re only two taps away.
Sometimes that hoop is simply pressing regular - followed by <space>, and autocorrect does the rest. At least in the Microsoft office suite with English language setting
Meanwhile, here I am learning how to type em dashes manually on my work MacBook.
Alt-shift-minus, very simple. Many extra symbols are available on Mac via the alt key. If you turn on the onscreen keyboard and hold the alt key (and other modifiers), all the symbols are shown on the respective keys.
If we press the EM dashes hard enough, no AI model will ever use them again. Then, we can prove we’re human with EM dashes.
What’s this?
