6 ms·
Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re a
by makingstuffs 9mo ago
Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.
Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious.
And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.
Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”
- karim79 9mo agoI would add that a lot of us who were born or grew up in the UK are quite comfortable saying stuff like "you're right, but...", or even "I agree with you, but...". The British politeness thing, presumably.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago0-24 in the UK, 24-62 in the USA, am now comfortable saying "I could be wrong, but I doubt it" quite a lot of the time :)
- mc3301 9mo agoAlso, I've seen people edit, one-by-one, each m-dash. And then they copy-paste the entire LLM output, thinking it looks less AI-like or something.
- zahlman 9mo agoOof. I don't know what's worse there: that they don't know a conventional way to find-and-replace, or that they didn't try asking the LLM not to use them. (Or to fix it afterwards.)
- jasonhansel 9mo agoEm-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- wk_end 9mo agoBut why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down? You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.
- MarkusQ 9mo agoNo. En-dash doesn't work "just as well" as an em-dash, anymore than a comma works as an apostrophe. They are different punctuation marks. Also, I was a curmudgeon with strong opinions about punctuation before ChatGPT—heck, even before the internet. And I can produce witnesses.
- fuzzer371 9mo agoThey mean the same thing to 99.999% of the population.
- kimixa 9mo agoIn British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces. It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma. Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more recent than some people seem to believe.
- babymetal 9mo agoJust my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.
- kimixa 9mo agoAs a brit I'd say we tend to use "en-dashes", slightly shorter versions - so more similar to a hyphen and so often typed like that - with spaces either side. I never saw em-dashes—the longer version with no space—outside of published books and now AI.
- dang 9mo agoThe en-dash is also highly worthy! Just to say, though, we em-dashers do have pre-GPT receipts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673869
- eru 9mo agoIt's also easy to get them in LaTeX: just type --- and they will appear as an em-dash in your output.
- susam 9mo agoCame here to confirm this. I grew up learning BrE and indeed in BrE, we were taught to use en-dash. I don't think we were ever taught em-dash at all. My first encounter with em-dash was with LaTeX's '---' as an adult.
- rmunn 9mo agoBesides the LaTeX use, on Linux if you have gone into your keyboard options and configured a rarely-used key to be your Compose key (I like to use the "menu" key for this purpose, or right Alt if on a keyboard with no "menu" key), you can type Compose sequences as follows (note how they closely resemble the LaTeX -- or --- sequences): Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period: produces – (en dash) Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen: produces — (em dash) And many other useful sequences too, like Compose, lowercase o, lowercase o to produce the ° (degree) symbol. If you're running Linux, look into your keyboard settings and dig into the advanced settings until you find the Compose key, it's super handy. P.S. If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.
- 9mo ago
- hayleox 9mo agoIt is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change? If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
- Ericson2314 9mo agoAlso on phones it is really easy to use em dashes. It's quite out in the open whether I posted from desktop or phone because the use of "---" vs "—" is the dead give-away.
- HaZeust 9mo agoHot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.
- imafish 9mo agoagree. it implies a strong relationship between the two words it is inserted between - not the sentences.
- vurudlxtyt 9mo agoThat sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact. I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.
- amrocha 9mo agoYou’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!
- forgotpwd16 9mo agoIf you want next, I can: - Tell you what makes em dashes appealing. - Help you use em dashes more. - Give you other grammatical quirks smart people have. Just tell me. (If bots RP as humans, it’s only natural we start RP as bots. And yes, I did use a curly quote there.)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- zahlman 9mo agoNo problem! But it's also important to consider your image online. Here are some reasons not to use em-dashes in Internet forum posts: * **Veneer of authenticity**: because of the difficulty of typing em-dashes in typical form-submission environments, many human posters tend to forgo them. * **Social pressure**: even if you take strides to make em-dashes easier to type, including them can have negative repercussions. A large fraction of human audiences have internalized a heuristic that "em-dash == LLM" (which could perhaps be dubbed the "LLM-dash hypothesis"). Using em-dashes may risk false accusations, degradation of community trust, and long-winded meta discussion. * **Unicode support**: some older forums may struggle with encoding for characters beyond the standard US-ASCII range, leading to [mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake).
- skipants 9mo agoI'm pretty sure the OP is talking about this thread. I have it top of mind because I participated and was extremely frustrated about, not just the AI slop, but how much the author claimed not to use AI when they obviously used it. You can read it yourself if you'd like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46589386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46589386 It was not just the em dashes and the "absolutely right!" It was everything together, including the robotic clarifying question at the end of their comments.
- fresh_broccoli 9mo agoDid you paste the wrong link? While the OP of that thread was accussed of using LLMs, the thread doesn't really match what the article describes. I think this one is a much closer fit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308
- anon_anon12 9mo agoWell the dialogue there involves two or more people, when commenting, why would you use that.. Even if you have collaborators, you wouldn't very likely be discussing stuff through code comments..
- skwee357 9mo agoThe thing with em-dashes is not the em-dash itself. I use em-dashes, because when I started to blog, I was curious about improving my English writing skills (English is not my native language, and although I have learned English in school, most of my English is coming from playing RPGs and watching movies in English). According to what I know, the correct way to use em-dash is to not surround it by spaces, so words look connected like--this. And indeed, when I started to use em-dashes in my blog(s), that's how I did it. But I found it rather ugly, so I started to put spaces around it. And there were periods where I stopped using em-dash all together. I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you write as a profession, most people are inconsistent. Sometimes, I use em-dashes. Sometimes I don't. In some cases I capitalize my words where needed, and sometimes not, depending on how in a hurry I am, or whether I type from a phone (which does a lot of heaving lifting for me). If you see someone who consistently uses the "proper" grammar in every single post on the internet, it might be a sign that they use AI.
- patrickmay 9mo agoI am a native English speaker and I agree with you completely that em-dashes look better when surrounded by spaces rather than connected directly to the words.
- postexitus 9mo agofound the LLM bot guys!
- BrtByte 9mo agoWhen that baseline erodes, even normal human quirks start looking suspicious
- 0xmattf 9mo ago> I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Likewise. I used to copy/paste them when I couldn't figure out how to actually type them, lol. Or use the HTML char code `—` It sucks that good grammar now makes people assume you used AI.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoYeah, I mean, ultimately, aren't the LLMs actually trained to look like human language? So whatever particular "quirk" you have as a writer, there is probably an LLM emulating that either wholesale, or like 50% of the times. LLMs use em-dash because people (in their training data) used em-dash. They use "You're absolutely right" because that's a common human phrase. It's not "You write like an LLM", it's "The LLMs write kind of like you", and for good reasons, that's exactly what people been training them to do. And yes, "pun" intended for extra effect, that also comes from humans doing it.
- forgotpwd16 9mo agoThe LLM output isn't an unfiltered result of an unbiased model. Rather, some texts may be classified high-quality (where the em-dash, curly quotes, a more sophisticated/less-everyday vocabulary are more expected to appear), some low-quality, and some choices are driven by human feedback (aka fine-tuning), either to improve quality (OpenAI employs Kenyans, Kenyan/Nigerian English considered more colonial) or engagement through affirmative/reinforcing responses ("You're absolutely right. Universe is indeed a donut. Want me to write down an abstract? Want me to write down the equations?"). Some nice relevant articles are [1],[2]. [1]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-style.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-...
- topaz0 9mo agoI'm in your camp, that both of these are appropriate for some situations. In particular I like starting with a variation on "you're absolutely right" when it appears my interlocutor has identified the wrong disagreement, before realigning the conversation to a more useful direction (though of course there are many phrases that accomplish that). It's still frequently identifiable in (current-generation) LLM text by the glossy superficiality that comes along with these usages. For example, in "It's not just X, it's Y", when a human does this it will be because Y materially adds something that's not captured by X, but in LLM output X and Y tend to be very close in meaning, maybe different in intensity, such that saying them both really adds nothing. Or when I use "You're absolutely right" I'll clarify what they are right about, whereas for the LLM it's just an empty affirmation.
- bee_rider 9mo agoYou’re absolutely right. It’s not just a writing style, it’s how the ideas are expressed.
- Anthony-G 9mo agoOn my side of the Atlantic using en-dashes with spaces on either side of the dash is acceptable writing style so that’s what I use (instead of em-dashes). However, many people can’t tell the difference between the two so some might confuse my writing from that of an LLM. But I’m not going to let that dictate my writing style. For the past 15 years, I’ve used the Unicycle Vim plugin¹ which makes it very easy to add proper typographic quotes and dashes in Insert mode. As something of a typography nerd, I’ve extended it to include other Unicode characters, e.g., prime and double-prime characters to represent minutes and seconds. At the same time, I’ve always used a Firefox extension that launches GVim when editing a text box; currently, I’m using Tridactyl for this purpose. ¹ https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1384 https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1384
- tonymet 9mo agoMost of my Wikipedia edits are converting tacky hyphens to em-dashes. I also autocomplete into em-dashes. hyphens are so hideous that I can't stand them.
- nextlevelwizard 9mo agoSorry but I don’t believe you about em dashes. I don’t recall ever seeing them in online content or comments before LLM’s got popular. Normal dashes for sure, but no one actually dug out special character for it