2 ms·

One of the most common criticisms is the use of the emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismi

One of the most common criticisms is the use of the emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismiss writing for form rather than for content. Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally). Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page: > It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth book, never... Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Question: three emdashes on the first page (as printed in The Complete Stories, Volume I) > ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: Three emdashes on page 1 > Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained -- whether by category or lection. Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: Five emdashes on page one > Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or, seemingly, by any other ornament Other pages 1s: * Murakami - 1Q84: 1 * Murray/Cox - Apollo: 1 * Meadows - Thinking in Systems: 1 * Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation): 4 * Caro - The Power Broker: 5 * Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach - 3 Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part of English-language literature and I reject the claim that we should ignore all writing that contains it.

dematz 7mo ago
When a drunk chef dumps way too much salt into my ramen, the fact that good ramen also contains (more tastefully applied) salt redeems nothing!
kristjansson 7mo ago
No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash. Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors accordingly. Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)
- genthree 7mo ago
  Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there. Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash employers being Mac users. (option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way) On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure. I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.

dematz 7mo ago

When a drunk chef dumps way too much salt into my ramen, the fact that good ramen also contains (more tastefully applied) salt redeems nothing!

kristjansson 7mo ago

No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash. Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors accordingly. Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)

genthree 7mo ago
Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there. Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash employers being Mac users. (option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way) On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure. I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.