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I took a peak at zmgsabst's comments, but they use them with spaces around the dash — like this. ChatGPT always uses them without spaces—like this.
by LeoPanthera 1y ago
I took a peak at zmgsabst's comments, but they use them with spaces around the dash — like this.
ChatGPT always uses them without spaces—like this.
- Symbiote 1y agoChanging the filter to text LIKE '%—%' AND text NOT LIKE '% —%' AND text NOT LIKE '%— %' puts westoncb in the lead, followed by mucholove, trebbble, _zzaw and lexcorvus.
- westoncb 1y agoI actually tweeted like a month ago that I was the reason LLMs use em dashes so much lol: https://x.com/Westoncb/status/1961802304698671407 https://x.com/Westoncb/status/1961802304698671407
- JdeBP 1y agoThere are quite a few —es on my WWW site and on StackExchange thanks to me; and I vaguely recall that I might even have written one on Wikipedia once. But I am quite happy for you to take the blame for training the LLMs. (-:
- westoncb 1y agolol no problem. In reality though there's kind of a funny story behind it because I suspect the way I ended up using them so much is similar to how ChatGPT did. When I got into writing I studied grammar, then decided to read a bunch of classics and analyze their usage of punctuation in general until I had a good understanding of every bit of it. Then, in order to practice, I'd apply what I learned to anything I was writing at the time whether journal notes, conversations on AIM/IRC etc. That latter step meant I was translating a lot of casual/natural speech into a form that also had a high level of 'correctness'. And if you faithfully translate natural speech into 'correct'ly punctuated sentences, you end up using a lot of em dashes. Because ChatGPT/LLMs are tuned for natural/authentic style, as well as for a high degree of 'correctness,' you get today's state of affairs. Just a theory.
- indigodaddy 1y agoI always thought the proper usage was no space before but one space after-- like this.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoThere's no "proper usage" for any feature of English: it's all by consensus. However, I have seen that in published books from the 1900s.
- eMPee584 1y ago& it looks awful without spaces — imho
- JKCalhoun 1y agoWhich is what I do (add a space before and after). I didn't know you weren't supposed to put the spaces until someone pointed it out to me — suggested I was not an LLM because I added the spaces. Makes me wonder if kerning is done correctly, if the em-dash would look like there were spaces before and after when there were not.
- card_zero 1y agoNot at all, no. Here's a few historical examples: 1903 edition of The Wizard of Oz — https://archive.org/details/newwizardofoz00baum/page/2/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/newwizardofoz00baum/page/2/mode/... A page from Life magazine, 1894 — https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1894-08-23_24_608/page/n5/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1894-08-23_24_608/page/... The Illustrated London News, 1843 — https://archive.org/details/illustrated-london-news-v002-1843/Illustrated%20London%20News%20%230054v002%20%281843-05-13%29%20%28BNA%29/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/illustrated-london-news-v002-184... The em dash pretty much just joins the two glyphs together. It's supposed to look that way.
- colanderman 1y agoThe common guidance I've seen is en dash with spaces, em dash without.
- perilunar 1y agoYou can also use an em-dash with thin spaces (U+2009) or hair spaces (U+200A), but it doesn't work on HN—they just display as regular spaces.
- Rumudiez 1y agoThe rule is spaces on both sides of an en dash – like so – or an em dash without any spaces—like this. Important to note the US keyboard layout does not have either of these or the minus glyph, just the hyphen, and it’s unadvisable to mix multiple styles