4 ms·
No one uses em dashes
by fuzzer371 9mo ago
No one uses em dashes
- awakeasleep 9mo agoExcept for highly literate people, and people who care about typography. Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.
- amrocha 9mo agoMy impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.
- rmunn 9mo agoExcept for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted. Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could-not-stop-for-death-479 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could... Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).
- Finnucane 9mo agoHere is an image of the original manuscript page: https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893 https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893 Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.
- crimony 9mo agoMicrosoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.
- BLKNSLVR 9mo agoThat's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.
- cwnyth 9mo agoCtrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.
- robin_reala 9mo agoOption shift - in macOS (option - gives you an en dash).
- leoc 9mo agoWindows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.
- dboreham 9mo agoYou can Google search "em-dash" then copy/paste from the resulting page.
- Terr_ 9mo agoAlt-0151 on the numpad in Windows. Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards. Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.
- schrodinger 9mo agoI do—all the time. Why not? I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9
- dboreham 9mo agoI didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.
- dragonwriter 9mo agoIf nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.
- DocTomoe 9mo agoTell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.
- account42 9mo agoApproximately no one writes internet comments or even articles in LaTeX.
- DocTomoe 9mo agoBut many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- 0xis 9mo agoWhen I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.