9 ms·
Em dashes are amazing
- icedchai 3mo agoTroglodyte here... I never use em dashes, never use semicolons, overuse ellipses and commas.
- cwmoore 3mo agoYou have ellipses… on my iOS, “…” have become one triple-dot
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoEllipses are garbage outside of dialog, and even there readers dislike seeing them frequently.
- icedchai 3mo agoI agree they are inappropriate to use in formal writing. For stuff like blogs and chatting online though, they're fine. As a reader, I dislike seeing em dashes almost everywhere.
- fellowniusmonk 3mo agoI love ellipses, it really captures that even when writing Rust documentation my mood is existential and disaffected... like a new grad in the pool, slowly burning under the noon sun on an inflatable lounger, too dazed and decadent to tap even a finger for their next paloma. //! This is mission critical, don't remove...
- comrade1234 3mo agoiOS settings-> general->keyboard Turn off smart punctuation. Saves bytes.
- jdw64 3mo agoI feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters. When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing? It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself. In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on
- sarreph 3mo agoI too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it. We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving over time (especially over the past two decades) I think I'd prefer to shift my habits in line with whatever the "modern standard" is in order to avoid falling into pitfalls, i.e. being accused of being an AI writer.
- 1718627440 3mo ago> ("--", the old school way of writing it) The old school of writing it in digital documents. Typesetting predates and is not limited to digital documents.
- sarreph 3mo agoGood point, but I think it's a little more complex than that. To my knowledge (and what I meant by "old school"), it was common to type a "--" dash on typewriters[0] because most of them lacked en- and em-dashes, which are obviously not digital documentation devices. But yes, typesetters of old (old, old school!) had myriad glyph blocks available to them for pressing! -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Typewriter_conventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Typewriter_conventi...
- xgulfie 3mo agoThe economy may collapse and the job market rendered irreparable but the real victims of the AI boom are the em-dash and the sparkle emoji
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- jtagrgh 3mo agoI really don't get liking em dashes. Just use two sentences or modify your original one. Both options are clearer like 90% of the time.
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- akaike 3mo agoAI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.
- jimbokun 3mo agoDon’t let the haters win.
- etempleton 3mo agoSame. It is really annoying to write something and have someone say, “just so you know, em dashes makes it obvious it was written by AI.” You know how else uses em dashes? People who know how to write.
- thewoodsman 3mo agoSo... fuck 'em? Hit 'em with a: "You're absolutely right — em dashes are a common signifier of AI" and go about your business. Anyone creating on the internet[1] is running laps around the class of losers who run from post to post dropping useless comments. [1]: I'd even go so far as to extend that "anyone" to: "anyone creating, even with AI assistance!"
- II2II 3mo ago> It is really annoying to write something and have someone say (...) It's worse than that. What they are saying is the equivalent to saying that knowing how to do something properly, and having the attention to detail to do so, makes it obvious it was written by AI. It sounds like a prelude to human incompetence, to ensuring that AI products are better than human ones. About the only semi-convincing argument that I've heard is that AI over uses these tells. But let's face reality here: a lot of people griping about AI generated or AI assisted writing are not looking at over use. Plus a lot of people tend to over use the said tells while they learn how to use them properly.
- quantummagic 3mo agoIt sounds like people ruined them for you — it isn't AI calling you out for using them.
- koolala 3mo agoTest: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.' I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?
- url00 3mo agoIt's a bit like 2 space indention versus 4 or 8 space. I find the em-dash example pretty compelling because visually relaxes my eye more than commas do — similar to how prefer at least 4 space indention over 2. (Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)
- thfuran 3mo agoI think offsetting the em dash with spaces is contrary to almost every style guide.
- jachee 3mo agoChicago does it one way and AP does it the other. I definitely prefer it un-spaced, though, personally.
- thfuran 3mo agoMLA and APA as well as Chicago.
- oneeyedpigeon 3mo agoI think this is a localisation issue; in the UK, it's much more common to see space-surrounded em dashes.
- thfuran 3mo ago
- john_strinlai 3mo agoi typically enjoy a good profanity-laden rant, but something about this particular one feels very forced. this sentence, for example: "[...] What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.". i cant really put my finger on why, but it almost feels like the author wrote their rant, then came back afterwards with a quota of fuck/shit/bitch they wanted to meet, placing them wherever they could. in any case, i mostly agree with the author that ai has co-opted too many things to be concerned about it anymore. i remember being linked a list of "1,000 words not to use" because ai used them a lot (e.g. "delve", "absolutely", etc.) and the venn diagram with the 1,000 most common english words was practically a circle. you would be unintelligible if you rigorously avoided them all. now i just write without care of my ai-similarity score.
- jimbokun 3mo agoIt smacks of “Hitler also loved…(some innocuous thing).”
- neuroticnews25 3mo ago>you would be unintelligible if you rigorously avoided them all You could write naturally and then let an LLM translate avoiding the 1000 words, with verification harness or maybe a custom sampler.
- assimpleaspossi 3mo ago>i typically enjoy a good profanity-laden rant, but something about this particular one feels very forced. Profanity for the sake of profanity is lame and immature.
- john_strinlai 3mo ago>lame and immature oh no!
- moron4hire 3mo agoIt's interesting that an article extoling the virtues of the em-dash isn't using them correctly. They don't get spaces around them.
- etempleton 3mo agoI have seen this more and more and I don’t understand it.
- douglee650 3mo agoI am personally a fan of space padded em-dash. Visually, semantically, it makes sense on all modern planes. There's an argument for line-break parsing. Of course I recommend do-not-adopt, think Roman-cart-wheel-axle-width reasons.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoThat’s not entirely true. Some formats yes. In this case they’re using it correctly https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
- pteraspidomorph 3mo agoIt's a stylistic choice. Here's an analysis, complete with a link back to an old HN discussion: https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash I beta read for a popular american author and they started using spaces too.
- weli 3mo agoIsn't english known for not having an official set of gramatical rules? There are conventions and rules from universities i.e Cambridge vs Oxford comma. But there is no single body that is commonly accepted by all english-speaking countries to be codifying the official rules of the language.
- ubitaco 3mo agoI didn't know that AP style recommended spaces either side of the em dash. Here in the UK we generally use en dashes instead, and I thought em dashes always had no spaces. Apparently the wire machines that AP sent their news out by in olden times couldn't always do en dashes.
- WillAdams 3mo agoOne of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted: - − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative - I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary - × (multiplication symbol) for use in dimensions and when actually indicating multiplication - ′ and ″ (single and double primes) for use when indicating feet and inches, or minutes and seconds - it also made explicit the difference between º (ordinal o) and ° (degree symbol) and noted when to make use of the other ordinals - … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces - © ® ™ ℠ ℗ (copyright and so forth) to indicate such legal constructs as appropriate - the various spaces en and em space, non-breaking flex space, &c. I _think_ I still have a photocopy somewhere, but really should find a copy of the actual magazine.... The far more egregious and reprehensible thing is that many books now are published using quite pedestrian typing of the near equivalents from the keyboard as opposed to actually typing the correct signs. I wrote a bit on this at: https://tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf https://tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf (note that it intended to be printed, folded, cut in the center, then re-folded so as to make a "hot dog" booklet: https://www.makingbooks.com/hotdog.shtml https://www.makingbooks.com/hotdog.shtml ) EDIT: That said, folks should be sure to get: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41600.The_Mac_is_Not_a_Typewriter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41600.The_Mac_is_Not_a_T... or https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358248.The_PC_is_Not_a_Typewriter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358248.The_PC_is_Not_a_T...
- jonhohle 3mo agoIf you’re on a Mac or iOS, it’s extremely easy to use the global text substitution to replace three periods (..., v...) with ellipsis (…, ⋮), and other symbols ((c), (r ), ^o, etc.) with their Unicode equivalent (©, ®, °, etc.).
- WillAdams 3mo agoOnce upon a time there was COMPOSE.exe on Windows, then allchars, and now we've come full-circle to wincompose: https://wincompose.info/ https://wincompose.info/
- andsoitis 3mo agoOne thing I've always loved about Apple's OSs is that they will render an em dash if you press-and-hold the hyphen key. Great accessibility.
- anonthrownaway 3mo ago----------------------------------------- huh? Oh - you meant iOS. I don't see a need to differentiate dashes there either...
- andsoitis 3mo agosorry, I meant iOS. on macOS you have to Option + Shift + Hyphen.
- mkagenius 3mo ago> Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes? Some people even take pride on being able to detect (often falsely) AI generated work.
- upghost 3mo agoI do indeed mis-using dashes.
- cubefox 3mo agoSpaced en dashes are far more common internationally. Em dashes are primarily a US American tradition.
- bluebarbet 3mo agoThe first thing that struck me too. Author seems oblivious that the whole subject is US-specific.
- jssmith 3mo agoI get it. But I never would have until I built muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut.
- gumby 3mo agoLLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.
- pohl 3mo agoEveryone unintentionally telling on themselves as not being big readers.
- hollandheese 3mo agoEm dashes are hardly ever used in modern literature. Sure, it's a tell that people aren't reading late 18th century to early 20th century literature, but that's not the same as not being big readers.
- pohl 3mo agoThat’s an extraordinary claim.
- hollandheese 3mo agoNot nearly as extraordinary as yours.
- Bolwin 3mo agoLlms use them a lot more than humans, including this blog post. Like all slop. There's a reason it's called slop and it's not because of restraint
- drob518 3mo ago> “But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Hell yes, and ROFL. I’m tired of em dashes being cited as evidence of AI.
- mmsc 3mo agoand here i thought "option -" was an em-dash, but no, it's an _en_-dash.
- pelagicAustral 3mo agoWhy the hell did they bury this thing three key-presses down on any keyboard???
- icedchai 3mo agoAsk a typical person the difference between a minus, dash, hyphen, en dash, and em dash and you'll have your answer.
- jesse_dot_id 3mo agoI still use them unapologetically. I don't give a shit about your AI purity tests, thank you.
- vova_hn2 3mo ago> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think? If I'm writing something, typically I want to share my thoughts with other people and get their feedback. It won't work if they dismiss my writing because of some superficial stylistic choice, without even trying to engage with the ideas that I'm trying to express.
- adamtaylor_13 3mo agoI never see emdashes squeezed tightly to the word before them. I only ever see them with an AP-style spacing before and after.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoThis post is so self-consciously dependent on inserting em dashes everywhere that it kinda supports its own counterargument. If you're going to make a case for em dashes enabling more fluid writing and more distinctive voice, then you ought to actually use them that way.
- st_goliath 3mo ago> ...on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen. Fedora with XFCE here, but last I checked on Windows, it worked exactly the same over there: With a Chinese IME installed, tap shift to switch input language, shift+hyphen produces a double em-dash: ——, likewise, shift+6 a double elipsis: …… You encounter those a lot in simple, machine translated Chinese, along with literal translations of "not X but Y", "not just ... but also" and similar sentence constructs that are common in Chinese. I suspect that's how a disproportionate amount of that ended up in training material in the first place.
- cma256 3mo agoI did not know option + shift + hyphen produced an em dash. I've always used a double hyphen as a stand in -- as I did just now. LLMs don't do it and I haven't been accused yet. Though, more likely, I'm not popular enough for people to notice! The overemphasis by critics on punctuation and "this not that" is tiring. I don't really know how to describe LLM writing but it has the same qualities as flat soda. Some authors you feel as though you fall through their work with little effort; unable to stop until gravity slams you into their conclusion. LLM writing can feel like an uphill hike to a sewage treatment plant. That is, its easy to convince yourself to stop at any time. There's a positive quality to that. I hope AI labs don't find a way to remove it.
- znort_ 3mo agowrites an anodyne wall of text about his obsession with particular elements in a character table - ends with: PS: if you want personalised advice from me on how to use punctuation correctly, you can now get it for $175/hour. humans sometimes ... ps: sasha, if you want me to read your future regurgitations you can now get that for €175/minute (limited availability, only skimread mode for now)
- globular-toast 3mo agoI've used dashes in typeset works ever since I learnt how to do them in (La)TeX (---). You don't usually put spaces around them, though. There are actually four different "dash" type things in TeX: a hyphen, an en dash (for ranges like "10--20 pages"), em dash (---), and the minus symbol ($-$).
- vladde 3mo agoi like em dashes too, and i've started using double dash -- to signify readers i'm a person
- chem83 3mo agoSame. On Google Docs it auto-corrects to an en-dash (–), which is annoying, but I find the double dash (--) more easy to spot and read on computer screens. Also, cosmetically I don't really like how em-dashes are used without spacing (e.g. "this—then that" instead of "this — then that"). Feels like we're trying to import publishing styles from newspapers and books heavy on serif font to places where monospace and sans-serif is the norm and it doesn't quite fit well.
- swe_dima 3mo agoI also love them - makes spotting AI written content easier. People debated implementing complex algorithms how to watermark AI content - but luckily AI just settled on it by itself. (sorry for a bit of gaslighting)
- vitorsr 3mo agoNothing wrong with CMOS/APA/MLA dashes, I quite like them but usage in LLM prose has ruined it for me. AP dashes are weird, too much horizontal spacing, looks horrible and can really erode typographic color sometimes. "International" Oxford/Cambridge spaced dashes is nicest. The funny thing is at both extremes, either none or indiscriminate use of dashes like in TFA, is a canary of "human writing". People (including comments here) often attribute LLM use to prevalence in training data but it is probably far less common in the wild than we are led to believe, the more likely scenario is that whatever text-to-text normalization tools used ended up inserting whatever their idiosyncratic typographic styles were.
- douglee650 3mo agoAuthor failed to explain the dash universe and their semantic assignments. - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — <declaration>) - en dash: expresses a range (1–100) - dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley) I'd also like to see more concise philosophy around em v. ellipsis, "limerance" is poetic (and ironically antithetical to this "essay" … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is personal. I offer this feedback as a humorously offended fan of all sidecar prose (dash, ellipsis, parens, quotes, and meta typographical treatments) pre-AI era. Finally, I'd love to hear from this author regarding modern use of period in modern comunication, with canonical use-case of bulleted list as example.
- mc32 3mo agoWhich one is the minus symbol?
- treetalker 3mo agoFun fact! Where a compound term is formed by joining two nouns of equal importance — such as Sarbanes–Oxley or attorney–client privilege — an en-dash, not a hyphen, should be used.
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- skinfaxi 3mo agoApparently the first use of the hyphen disagrees: > The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time, hyphenation was joining two pieces of text that might otherwise be read as two separate words by a low tie mark. This was necessary due to the ambiguity inherent in the lack of word spacing. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen
- anonthrownaway 3mo agoFunny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash. I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based). (ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)
- ryandrake 3mo agoWie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?
- anonthrownaway 3mo agoWrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).
- WillAdams 3mo agoBecause it looks better and is a guide to communication. For the poster child of a naïvely set/composed text which suffers thereby see: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/virtuoso_excerpt_.pdf https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/vir... That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetting unions all bargained for sinecures rather than active participation in the Desktop Publishing Revolution.
- anonthrownaway 3mo ago>Because it looks better and is a guide to communication. Personally, I think em-dashes (when in a font that shows the damn difference) look exaggerated and silly. They certainly don't provide any important guidance to its meaning that I can't derive from context. That was a cool toolbox BTW :)
- usui 3mo agoYou might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B). Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.
- eddyg 3mo ago"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry." https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes
- usui 3mo agoI mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.
- locknitpicker 3mo ago> I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.
- pimlottc 3mo agoIt’s can’t be any more difficult than getting people to agree on how many spaces to use for indentation…
- adverbly 3mo agoThat is so stupid. Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large). Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power. The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.
- mahoho 3mo agoSince before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dataset of middlebrow American news blogs and similar sources. So I'm not surprised that the em dash has stuck out to people as such a prominent feature of its style. It definitely has its uses but I can't say I would mind at all if the controversy diminished its use in real writing.
- midnightbobarun 3mo agoSame here. Long before ChatGPT existed, I always associated em dashes with pretentious writers who chose style over substance, mostly as their writing had no real substance. That AI makes em dashes a faux pas in these days... it brings me a little joy.
- DonHopkins 3mo agoFour words: Comic Sans Em Dashes! https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo agoI'm all for Unicode if you want to say something like 你好 but separate nearly similar characters, like the different kinds of dashes, feel somehow wasteful. I prefer to stick with things that align with ASCII. Typesetting aside, the em-dash as a grammatical construct is indeed pretty great.
- peheje 3mo agoThis is a great read — really — a truly great one — it really is.
- snowwrestler 3mo agoEm dashes—if properly used—are really useful. They help convey that I am so smart—and I think so fast—that I have to constantly interrupt myself. But—and I think this is important—it’s really easy to overuse them.
- jayknight 3mo agoAh, so my constant interrupting myself is a sign of intelligence? That's great news. But seriously, trying to express the spider web of thoughts in my head as a linear string of words is really difficult for me and that doesn't make me feel very smart.
- CollinEMac 3mo agoAt some point in middle/high school I realized that teachers were very impressed by em dashes and semicolons; I started using both constantly.
- rekpero 3mo agoem dashes are the best thing to track if the content is AI written, lol
- marpstar 3mo agoOn more than one occasion I've told an LLM "Do not use em dashes". It's one of the easiest tells.
- rekpero 3mo agoI ended up adding this to every one of my `claude.md` files across all my projects, really annoying tbh
- LocalH 3mo agoNope. The best tell isn't any single given character, but the general flow of the prose. I find "it's not X - it's Y" or "No X. No Y. Just Z and W." to be stronger tells than the mere presence of emdashes. Hell, overuse of emoji is more of a tell than the mere presence of emdashes. The problem here is really "AI detection" services that themselves use AI to perform the service. More than one person has fed pre-AI text to such a detector only to be told "this is 75% AI" or some shit. Students who didn't use AI have been near harassed by their teachers because the teacher used some kind of AI-based AI detector, and it hallucinated. People want to believe the computer because they think "oh the computer is objective" and throw out all logic afterwards. Unfortunately, the rise of AI has brought subjectivity to computers, in the worst possible way. You see the same thing with the family who got accosted in California by multiple police vehicles coming out of a retail store, because somebody in New Jersey lost a dealer tag and entered a partial tag number in the report, which ended up being fed to Flock's search engine, which then provided the partial search results it was asked to. Everyone along the way trusted the computer as if it was the single source of truth, but that "source of truth" was tainted by incorrect input. Literally GIGO on a life-altering scale. Other people were already being watched. It was just probability, to the point where that family probably had equal probability to win the multi-state lottery jackpot. Go watch the Computer Chronicles episode on AI. It's very prescient. The main issue is that currently, people treat AI as if the problems brought up in that episode have been resolved, when they haven't at all. Use of AI is fine as long as there is human review along every step of the process. Anyone using AI as a shortcut to actually doing the work they're paid to do needs to be removed from whatever situation they're involved in at the earliest convenience. Otherwise it's just an expose on the fact that humans are somehow intrinsically lazy, despite the outliers of the hardworking person (which does exist, I've known people who would move mountains to make what you need done possible, and the rest are just pivoting to AI to fake it). Fake it until you make it, I feel, is the core of modern "AI". People also forget that AI as a field is much older than modern generative AI.
- dboreham 3mo agoI was introduced to em and en dashes reading Knuth's book on typesetting (the original one, before the TeX book series). Perhaps LLMs were too...
- coderbants 3mo agoI just use hyphens all the time and always have. I don’t like that AI loves em dashes so much that it looks like everything I write now is AI generated, but if you were to deep dive you’d notice I’m using hyphens - never em dashes - so my writing can’t be AI. Granted you’d have to be pretty pedantic to care in the first place but it’s 2026 and here we are.
- al_be_back 3mo agoEm dashes are indeed amazing! Go U+2014 ! has anyone used/seen em dashes in file/dir names? just wondered — I have't. It's certainly easier to read than a hyphen/minus...but i guess it may become problematic cross-platform (on windows/linux it isn't as straight forward as on macos).
- mark_something 3mo agoI used to have ripped music that had em dashes in the filenames. But several music players displayed a question mark for it. So I replaced them all with a hyphen.
- al_be_back 3mo agoVery interesting. The media tracks may've been em dashed during prod. Spotify seems to use this format "Artist — Album".
- mark_something 3mo agoI ripped music from both CDs and Internet radio (not Spotify). I remember there were definitely em dashes in those from Internet radio, but I'm not sure whether they also occurred in those from CDs — those filenames probably came from an online DB. Of course the Internet radios might have ripped the music in the same way.
- carimura 3mo agofunny. I was just texting someone this morning and using emdashes — and thought to myself... oh no.
- mark_l_watson 3mo agoMy problem with AI use of em-dashes is that it covers up sloppy writing. I simply collected about six examples of horrible use of em-dashes and how I would have written the text. This became part of my SKILL for general writing (along with a lot of other specific examples).
- hmokiguess 3mo agoThank you, I also love using them.
- jonathanstrange 3mo agoIt annoys me that recently people seem to propagate the wrong use of em dashes. There is no space—an em dash is practically never typeset with spacing. You use an en dash in European typesetting – they have spaces, which your typesetting system hopefully adjusts to sane values. They're not like the spaces between words. At least, that's how I learned it. Everyone seems to disagree and write em dashes with spaces nowadays.
- gcmeplz 3mo agoAgreed that it (used to be) less common. AP style (like the article mentioned) uses spaced em dashes, and I think that style of spaced em dashes are more common in writing today because that's what Claude (particularly Sonnet) likes to use (based on some half-baked investigation I did a bit ago [^1]). OpenAI models generally uses the American-style unspaced em dashes, which is why that particular style looks LLM-y to people now. edit: Another comment recommended https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash which does an awesome job of diving into dash usage by style guide [^1]: https://will-keleher.com/posts/your-dashes-suggest-which-model-youre-copy-pasting-from/ https://will-keleher.com/posts/your-dashes-suggest-which-mod...
- lardosaurusrex 3mo agoin order to inform people that im not a bot/llm i -- outside of giving up on autocorrect -- use two dashes instead of one solid line because LLMs were using them a lot. unfortunately microsoft (specifically outlook) and libreoffice have chosen to replace them with a proper em dash even if you turn off autocorrect which is bonkers-levels of infuriating. if i turn off something it /should be turned off/, not just be kinda turned off; y'know?
- zaps 3mo agoNice language
- itissid 3mo agoIf you love em dashes and commas you will also love this https://archive.ph/0dxpW https://archive.ph/0dxpW from the newyorker by Mary Norris. I was never a big reader as a kid, but I fell in love with the New Yorker, much later in life, where I kind of adopted their idea of: "Once you understand them, you can read through long sentences very easily". That is the newyorker style of writing. One falls into two buckets, you love that kind of writing or you hate it. If its the latter, you should adopt em-dashes and commas to improve your writing style.
- tptacek 3mo agoI mean I feel the same way about the stink that's on em-dashes now, but they are kind of a lazy writing habit.
- narrator 3mo agoI think Em dashes are fine in fiction where you're listening to someone's train of thought or something sudden happens, but they are really annoying in non-fiction.
- Bratmon 3mo agoI think the Em dash fans are quitters ⸻ there are much longer dashes in Unicode they can use.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3mo agoI personally really dig semicolons.
- ooterness 3mo agoYou might enjoy this song by Lonely Island: https://youtu.be/M94ii6MVilw?si=VUEIm_VVEHQIn9Y3 https://youtu.be/M94ii6MVilw?si=VUEIm_VVEHQIn9Y3
- phplovesong 3mo agoEm dashes = Stop reading immediately. Its 99.9% AI generated, and i wont be offering my time to that.
- alun 3mo agoI love the author's attitude. In my writing, I'll probably consider using en dashes ("-") in place of em dashes ("—") in the way he describes. While it technically won't be grammatically correct, it'll get the benefits he describes in the article while also not being accused of being AI-generated.
- achenet 3mo agofrom TFA: > Em dashes can be used instead of brackets in a sentence — like this one for example — and you can just type your shit and keep going. Brackets are for people who raise their hand in meetings and say: “this might be a stupid question”. A parenthetical is whispering: “Sorry, don’t mind me, I’ll be quick”. Em dash kicks the door open and announces itself. Use brackets when you are embarrassed by your own thought. Literally had me laughing out loud. And then this bit: > As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together. I am always happy when I find a place for the little guy semicolon. But, again, most cases where you could use one are better off served by the em dash as well. couldn't help but remind me of the following Kurt Vonnegut quote: > Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. :D
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- BeetleB 3mo agoEver since the em-dash AI association, I've instructed my blog to use em dashes everywhere: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/a-proclamation-regarding-the-restoration-of-the-dash/ https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/a-proclamation-regardi...
- MetaWhirledPeas 3mo ago> on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen And on Windows it's Alt + 0151 on the numeric keypad, which means you a) must have a numeric keypad and remember the number, or b) must use the emoji search. And on Linux it's weird too. Em dashes are therefore Mac user garbage. The correct replacement is --
- tracker1 3mo agoMS-Word will replace " - " inside a paragraph with an em dash, fwiw. I don't know for sure about other word processors, I don't use them much tbf.
- DicIfTEx 3mo agoI'm unreasonably fond of the numero symbol (№), although I've never quite settled on whether it should be followed immediately by the number or whether there should be a (non-breaking, potentially thin) space between them. Although it does tend to look awful in monospace fonts.
- yreg 3mo agoI'm used to often using both — and … when I write something (even short informal messages). One advantage of my ESL english is that the text I produce doesn't look that much AI generated anyway…
- eth0up 3mo agoRegarding the AI-perspective of the emdash being commiserated here... As a few have pointed out, many writers have been using it usefully since long before the blight. The current state of revolt is probably a phase though, as models will learn to account and adjust for the litany of literary crimes they've been committing. In some ways we are fortunate to have such easy signals to work with while, already, false positives are becoming almost as common as actual positives, indicating it might not be long before we just can't tell anymore. Which would suck, but then we'd have to adjust the nature of our complaints to something more profound, something more... insidious, something.... Maybe Woodrow Wilson? [0] It's not only the emdash that threatens the quality of our dialog and linguistic welfare — it's many principles, such as the the Rebuttle>Reframe>Prescribe structure of this very sentence. Once is a lot, but multiple instances of this structure in a single comment would be worse than swallowing a double hyphen sideways. The LLM is methodical, deliberate, unhurried — in a way that rewards the vigilance, attention and patience required to spot compulsions, such as the Rule-of-Three seen here. It's important to catch and worth noting each instance of filler-transition that adds little information while working toward word-counts. Undoubtedly, if we want to make our world safe for the emdash once again, we certainly should not overlook overused intensifiers posing in places where real work should be. While such examples can be found in legitimate human-written texts, they can also be found in LLM generated texts, and this Reflexive false balance style sentence is suggesting we just can't always be sure. Consider a person suffering generic example syndrome, where instead of naturally recalling a situation from actual memory, an example might be synthesized from some statistical category, seeming a bit out of place. And do not forget sentence length clustering around a mean, which humans have a tendency to naturally avoid. Frictionless surfaces might also hint the involvement of LLMs, where the final structure may be suspiciously clean of normal human quirks. Of course, the ultimate question here isn't even being asked, and the emdash is not a registered trademark of LLMs. It's not about whether we should fear using them, or even their value — it's about this Symmetrical closing that despite being written by a human (maybe subhuman) has strong patterns of an LLM. 0. “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” Wilson went a bit farther than might have an LLM. But who knows, the future may bring new rules, perhaps even a rule of 6.
- taco_emoji 3mo agoSpent the whole essay typing them incorrectly. There should not be spaces surrounding an emdash.
- Anamon 3mo agoIncorrect. Merriam-Webster allows for both. And the article itself mentions that wrapping it in spaces is the AP style. Personally, I find it ugly and less readable without spaces.
- socalgal2 3mo agoWe should pronounce punctuation (Victor Borge) https://youtu.be/ZEJBBlRlhAU?t=251 https://youtu.be/ZEJBBlRlhAU?t=251
- JSR_FDED 3mo agoHe uses the word fuck so much that his argument must be true
- FpUser 3mo agoI think Em-dashes are fucking useless and confusing.
- throwitaway222 3mo agoThere were too many em-dashes in this article, so I think it was written with AI.
- _superposition_ 3mo agoMelancholy ellipsis...
- rafram 3mo agoLLMs abuse em-dashes by putting them in places where a comma would be more appropriate. Especially as the separator before the last item in a list (in place of an "Oxford comma"). Classic LLM-speak em-dash mistreatment is something like, "This design brings performance, power — and speed." They also like to use em-dashes excessively, especially in bulleted lists, to separate a topic from a comment in each list item. Avoid those and you're fine. They aren't good writing style anyway. Used well, em-dashes are good!
- ratelimitsteve 3mo ago>There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum — but in the same sentence, not a new one — and, guess what, the em dash is right there for you. this is several sentences bound together in a rat king and furthers my theory that the use of more exotic punctuation like em dashes is the linguistic equivalent of a code smell. It may do the job, but it strongly indicates that your writing would benefit from rephrasing the entire sentence.
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- joshmarinacci 3mo agoI am overjoyed with how many commenters we have here who enjoy talking about typography.
- mybbor 3mo agoEm dashes really came on my radar, and I started using and appreciating them after reading Barack Obama's AMA on Reddit. His responses there felt very personal, genuine, and conversational and I think a lot of it had to do with the way he used em dashes (although, looking back at it now, they weren't "proper" em dashes).
- mrtnmcc 3mo agoJust use -- to signal you're a human. That and two spaces after periods :)
- infamouscow 3mo agoIf someone accuses you of using AI because of em-dashes, reply with something condescending like "I'm sorry you were poorly educated, but some of us can and do read books." It does wonders to put jackasses in their place.
- tavavex 3mo agoThis post only makes the case for em dashes from a writing and expression point of you. But it misses why people now distrust em dashes - it's not about sentence structure or expression, it's the symbol itself. I have a question to all em dash users reading this - why wouldn't I just use a regular dash in place of the normal full-length character? I have already done this several times in this very comment, and it's a very common convention on the internet. Outside publishing and other types of very high-brow writing, the fifty different variations of dashes with minor differences in length are pretty pointless, in my opinion. There's almost no scenarios where you need to make a distinction between them, what could possibly be misinterpreted because of dash length? So why not just use the regular, standard dash everywhere?
- pama 3mo agoThe internet convention in the 90s used to be two dashes for the en-dash character and three dashes for em-dash character. You used a space-dash-space notation that is easy to decipher but the typical dashes variants dont have spaces around them. When I read a text message I dont expect careful typography—in a book or an article I want perfection. More importantly though, the em-dash-in-a-sentence construct is a way of thinking and the notation is of lesser importance than the way to express oneself. I dont think the current distrust is from the symbol: the LLMs love em dashes for the same reasons many of us do, and, perhaps better than most of us, they have no trouble using the correct symbol.
- vonunov 3mo agoThe em dash (at least from an American perspective) is the "regular dash". Referring constantly to the "em dash" is a new thing; in my experience, it used to be understood that "dash" by default referred to the function/role of the punctuation mark that in America we format as an em dash, and that in the UK they (mostly) format as a spaced en dash. You have that function formatted as a hyphen: a dash in the abstract but not typographically.
- ozim 3mo agoI was definitely hooked up on pace of the writing and it was a lot of things that I would agree. Definitely — fucking great — something to read.
- aanet 3mo ago> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think? Are you really that easily swayed by a rando’s opinion? Endorsed. This post gets my vote. Two thumbs up vote.
- mainland 3mo agoIf you are at all interested in punctuation---and especially the em-dash---I highly recommend Nicholson Baker's essay "Survival of the Fittest" in the NYRB: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-fittest/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-... I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994, sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.
- megiddo 3mo agoAppositives are my favorite.
- smcg 3mo agoI don't like them, I don't like text editors changing the literal text that I type. I think we should just use double dash -- instead.
- jakzurr 3mo agoCan't help it. I like em dashes in works of fiction (e.g., C.J. Cherryh); I also find em dashes improve technical writing (for me). Sometimes adding spaces around em dashes is not about preference, but helpful due to the font, or the device, you're reading on. At some zoom-levels, for example, an em dash may bump into an italicized word unless there's a bit of extra space.
- ar_lan 3mo agoAnother AI slop post — so hot these days.
- dang 3mo ago(We don't particularly have anything against profanity but here it seemed gratuitous so I've taken fucking out of the title above.)
- xhevahir 3mo agoI'm reminded of a remark I read somewhere that the em dash is "almost excessively versatile." > As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash All that energy spent on punctuation, and still: comma splices. ):
- hungryhobbit 3mo agoI honestly couldn't tell if the author was writing satire (about AI writing detection?) or is just an idiot who doesn't understand why we have language rules to facilitate communication. I want to think it's the latter, but it's so exquisitely stupid I keep thinking it's "stupid on purpose".
- jedberg 3mo agoI miss being able to use em dashes and not be accused of being a robot.
- Mike-Kelner 3mo agoAbout 15-20 years ago the em dash became popular in the Russian web-design community because, surprisingly, it is the proper character to use. Using "-" was a sign of low-quality work. I remember I even wrote a small app in C#, so I could have it on the screen, click a button, and get "—", "«" or "»" in the clipboard ("«" and "»" also mattered, because " is not really a legitimate character in Russian typography).
- TacticalCoder 3mo agoI love it, it's in the style of the good old "The bile blog", a Java blog of the Web 1.0 era that was using a very colorful language.
- meerita 3mo agoNow, when someone sees an em dash, they automatically think, "It’s AI-generated." It’s a pity that AI indirectly created this hysteria.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoFor reference, here's the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style, and what it has to say about all sorts of dashes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Dashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Dash... Wikipedia usage is probably a significant factor in the way LLMs understand language, by extension from the manuals of mainstream media outlets.
- randyrand 3mo agoWould be ironic if this entire piece was written with AI.
- DonsDiscountGas 3mo agoI hated em dashes before it was cool. Pretentious and pointless. I use parentheses, semi colons, commas, and shorter sentences.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agoI've been playing with a tagline for my new startup. "Monotonic Labs: We Do What We Have To—Because We Like It"
- throw10920 3mo agoCan you please add an email to your HN profile?
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agob7r6@b7r6.net
- bccdee 3mo agoI've turned against them, partly because they're too flexible. Many of the things a dash does can be done better by more specific forms of punctuation like semicolons, colons, or brackets, which give your sentence a clearer visual structure. It's also easy to get too used to dashes and start sticking them in places where they don't belong. If you're using a coordinate conjunction like "and" or "but," a dash is awkward and redundant. "A period is great to express a complete thought — and it shifts the register of the next letter," can more easily be "a complete thought, and it shifts" or "a complete thought — it shifts." Dashes take up a lot of space. Like exclamation points, they draw the eye. Does the eye really need to be drawn to "a complete thought; it shifts"? If you let them, dashes will replace all your other punctuation marks, and your writing will become a soup of horizontal lines. Dashes are a sometimes food.
- dexterlagan 3mo agoTerrible writing. Uses em dashes incorrectly and for no good reason. I like them too, and I'm saddened that they're now seen as a sign of AI slop. But that writeup is sadder.
- tpoacher 3mo agoseparating em dashes (or preferably en dashes) with spaces is british style; no space is US style.
- brachkow 3mo agoIn Eastern Europe, a lot of computer-savvy people write with em dashes. I see two reasons behind that: 1. There is a highly popular Cyrillic keyboard layout with an em dash made by design educator Ilya Birman – https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout. 2. His colleague, Maxim Ilyahov is the author of an extremely popular book on writing good copy. Somehow, this book was a bestseller for years and was read by all kinds of common folk. I once saw a janitor reading it on a break!
- cainxinth 3mo ago>As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together. A semicolon is more than a comma but less than a colon. It's for when I want to use a comma, but it would be grammatically incorrect to.