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Good writers who used em dashes before AI tend to use them the traditional way—with no space around them and to emphasize a parenthetical. AI uses it with space
by viccis 1y ago
Good writers who used em dashes before AI tend to use them the traditional way—with no space around them and to emphasize a parenthetical. AI uses it with spaces around it — as an all-purpose conjunction.
- Forgeties79 1y agoYeah I use em dashes probably every day. It’s only recently that people have started taking issue with it lol
- viccis 1y agoI used to think people here didn't really use them before AI, but I actually downloaded a dataset of all comments over like a decade or so and counted the number of comments with an em dash, and it didn't actually change much around 2022-2023 like I had expected. It's the spacing that's usually the giveaway to me, as well as the fact that it's not as common for people to use them like semicolons. They use them for parenthetical clauses more often. Any time I see them used with spaces as a general purpose conjunction, THAT'S when I think AI.
- Forgeties79 1y agoI have a very conversational way of writing partially because I do voice to text a lot, so the em dash just “feels” better to me than a semicolon typically.
- __d 1y agoAgreed: a semi-colon is a bit stop-start, while a en-dash just flows. I’ve used them, with spaces, for decades. Minus-minus in plain text, and autocorrect reads that nicely. I sometimes use an em-dash, but mostly in LaTeX: they’re too awkward in plain text. I use ellipses too …