4 ms·
An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that
by Drupon 4mo ago
An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
- ixtli 4mo agoI wish more people had casual exposure to professional translators. Its a deeply important, vanishingly small segment of the human population and has been this way for at least many thousands of years. Also, it will continue to be!
- madaxe_again 4mo agoI’ve a friend who does simultaneous interpretation at the UN and she’s just… good god, how do you even do that. Oh, and she does it in six languages. And here I am, brain the size of a galaxy, and I fumble my way through every language I speak other than English. Serious respect for the linguists.
- projektfu 4mo agoI guess I should have figured Marvin would be here on HN, feeling sorry for himself.
- sandblast 4mo ago> brain the size of a galaxy Wow, aren't you humble.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoIt's a quote from Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- bluechair 4mo agoMy first rule—before doing anything else—when writing a sentence, is to check whether I could have removed the em dashes by re-ordering the elements. Update: in case it’s not obvious, I am sorry. I could not help it.
- anotherevan 4mo agoUpdate: I am sorry. In case it's not obvious — I could not help it. FTFY
- madaxe_again 4mo agoMy writing used to be littered with them, but I now eschew the em in favour of en, as it has become too strong an anti-shibboleth. I have also taken to being sloppier in my prose, as I’ve had stories rejected for being “written by AI” - when they’re shorts I wrote more than a decade ago. Reworked them to sound like a moron, accepted. Sigh.
- AStrangeMorrow 4mo agoI have a similar issue. I tend to have a very “structured” type of writing. Say on slack or Reddit for example. Using markdown formatting. Lists with bulletpoints etc. And I tend to write long detailed explanations, sometimes too long if I am being honest. But now I find myself adding noise and imperfections to my writing (not that it was perfect) to make it more human, which is kinda silly.
- jimbokun 4mo agoThe LLMs decided to use you as the model for the pinnacle of human communication style.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Hendrikto 4mo ago> I now eschew the em in favour of en They have different meaning and are not interchangeable.
- madaxe_again 4mo agoFully aware - although now the broader meaning of the em dash has become “I am an LLM”.
- spider-mario 4mo agoFor the use discussed here, they basically are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash_versus_em_dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash_versus_em_dash
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- olivierestsage 4mo agoEm dashes are really good actually and a standard stylistic choice for non-technical writing, particularly outside the US.
- anigbrowl 4mo agoThey certainly have their place, but are massively overused in contemporary American prose. This might be slight more of an east coast thing, but that's just a subjective impression that I'm not willing to spend time measuring. To me they come off as faddish, with many writers using them where commas and semicolons would have done just as well. I think their popularity stems from teh fact that provide the sense of a personal aside from the writer, allowing them to be more expressive while clearly delineating the personal or contextual remark from the main flow of the prose. No doubt this works for a lot of readers, but I find it tedious.
- kevinwang 4mo agoI use them because I know what I want to say out loud, but transcribing the pause with commas is incorrect because it's a comma splice, and I find that the semicolon often looks glaringly overly formal. So I've settled on the em-dash.
- epihelix 4mo agoIt's a fad that has been going strong for centuries in published literature, so I'd guess an awful lot of authors world disagree with you. You can restructureany sentence to use fewer forms of punctuation -- but if you do that, you'll lose nuance. And nuance, in writing, is a very fine thing.
- anigbrowl 4mo agoThe em-dash has indeed been around for centuries, but the fad I refer to is its overuse in contemporary American prose. IF you look at Google Books n-gram viewer, you can see it went through a surge of popularity over a few decades that then fell off sharply. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E2%80%93&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E2%80%93&year... It's also notable that the em-dash is approved in American Manuals of Style, while discouraged in British ones. I was unable to find longitudinal data for the em-dash's use in magazines, blogs etc., but AI summaries suggest it's 3-4 times more used in those contexts than in news reports. Like strawberry ice cream or apple pie, nuance is certainly a fine thing; but a surfeit of it becomes cloying, and the antipathy toward the omnipresence of the em-dash in LLM-generated prose, along with other kinds of literary expression like contrast and comparison, suggests to me that people have had more than enough of it.
- hyperpape 4mo agoFirst sentence: > In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had. The em-dash matches how you'd speak out loud. You'd say "I take two classes every Tuesday back to back, boxing and 'body sculpt'. Weird name." (Parts of that sentence did flow oddly, but not because of the em-dash). Grammarians say you can't make those separate sentences without adding some extra words, and because of blah-de-blah-blah-blah, someone might say you can't join them with a comma. So we have an em-dash. Rewriting the sentence would make it flow less naturally, not more.
- pvillano 4mo agoWhen I write like I talk, I use a lot of commas. Replacing some of my commas with em dashies, so long as it was done judiciously, would probably make things easier to chunk.
- stogot 4mo agoI’ve seen people use colons where em dashes are effective. I use em dashes. AI leans heavily on them for same reason
- mcmcmc 4mo agoIt’s become the exclamation mark of mid-sentence punctuation. It connotes fragmented or interrupted speech in my opinion. The problem is that writing is not speech, that’s why it is more often seen in written dialogue.
- 113 4mo agoGood writing shouldn't just be how you talk out loud.
- inopinatus 4mo agoGood writing doesn’t exclude it.
- TZubiri 4mo agoEither it's LLM generated, or it's written by someone who wants to be ambiguous about using LLMs. Either way, I'm not reading it, it's a clanker or a clanker collaborationist. I mean, how would you even write an em dash? There's no button in the keyboard for em dashes, it's not in ascii, it's just not something we write in internet text with, it's a safety watermark put into LLMs by OpenAI to help making LLM generated content identifiable as such. If for some reason you are an em dash lover that was hurt by the LLM debacle, I'm so sorry for your loss, but look who's on your side, give the em dash a funeral and let it go.
- inopinatus 4mo agoYour argument goes as follows: “I’m incapable of it, therefore no-one is capable of it”. Followed by, “You should abandon your preferences because I don’t share them”.
- TZubiri 4mo agoOn some fields doing somethingothers are not capable is an advantage, on others it's elitism. Language, communication, are more like the latter, communicarion benefits from everyone using a common language, except when that niche sociolect is domain specific, which an emdash isn't.
- hexasquid 4mo ago"clanker" Slang for an AI, used by a Blade Runner
- Lalabadie 4mo ago> I mean, how would you even write an em dash? ⌥ ⇧ + It's been seared into my muscle memory for more than a decade. I keep using it, too. It's present in the popular training sets – and then in LLM outputs – simply because it's proper punctuation.
- zhuli 4mo agoI wrote the article. Sorry if I like em dashes. It's alt + 151 BTW.
- zhuli 4mo agoEnglish isn't my native language. Also, I like em dashes. And if this is my worst sin, so be it.