4 ms·
You’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!
by amrocha 9mo ago
You’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).