4 ms·
Maybe nit-picky, but this is one place (the title here I'm talking about) a properly choosen dash would've saved me a couple seconds or so. When I was reading
by gkya 8y ago
Maybe nit-picky, but this is one place (the title here I'm talking about) a properly choosen dash would've saved me a couple seconds or so. When I was reading this, I thought first to myself, what is a crap-loot box, only to understand later that the endash there stood for a semicolon. But endash is for word pairs (i.e. black--white, on--of); here, an emdash would be more appropriate.
- DerekL 8y agoThe original article uses an em-dash. So either Are Technica fixed it since it was submitted, or the submission mistyped it.
- radicalbyte 8y agoThere's nothing wrong per se with using the dash, at least if you get the spacing right. If you use a dash as a punctuation you should either use spaces or - as you said - the correct glyph.
- gkya 8y agoI'd say otherwise. It's not like it's really important here, but in a book, that would be a very bright sign of amateurishness to me. Just like with sans serif dotless `i', `n' and `m' the only difference is not the number of the loops, the same with the hyphen, endash and emdash, they mean different things. Hyphen compounds words or breaks them across the line break, endash connects them in logical relations, and an emdash can stand for a colon or a pair of parantheses, indicating a subordinate clause that serves as an aside, generally. When these are mixed up, parsing the text becomes harder. It's not much of a trouble here in an internet title, but when this kinds of misuse appear in a long, difficult period in some rather complex text, it can end up consuming too much time.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]