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I feel this in my bones, as someone who has been using em dashes in their texts and writing before ChatGPT existed. In the past year, I’ve had 3 or 4 times whe

I feel this in my bones, as someone who has been using em dashes in their texts and writing before ChatGPT existed. In the past year, I’ve had 3 or 4 times when someone has “called me out” for using AI when I’m just an em dash organically.There’s no discussion of what I wrote; just immediate anger. It feels like giving in, but I might have to edit my writing style just because of the visceral reactions

somat 1mo ago
Probably a stupid question, but what is your mechanical process? that is, how do you make entering a em-dash natural? Personally, I am of the nature that if it does not live on my keyboard I am probably not going to use the character, And I say this as a great aficionado and maintainer of a carefully curated compose key file... That I never use. Guesses, because I like to guess, replace the dash with an em-dash? map alt+dash? compose-key dash dash dash?(my preferred method), dash dash rewrite rule(now we are getting into science fiction), ligature?
- manwe150 1mo ago
  Use a Mac or iphone? The opt-dash key combo has mapped to em-dash for a long time, and I think you can now just long press the dash key too. The opt key doesn’t scale beyond the hundred or so extra characters it gives space to live on the keyboard, but it sure is a lot better than memorizing Unicode code points, and the rest I can get from the Fn (or Fn-E), which activates a Unicode search panel just about everywhere. I don’t know which Linux toolkits do something similar, and Windows Character Map seems to be somehow even worse than I remember from several decades ago.
  - schopra909 1mo ago
    Yep on iPhone I just use two dashes —- and it looks like an emdash
  - graftak 1mo ago
    That’s an en-dash, used to denote a range, i.e. 1950–1975. The em-dash includes the shift key as well.
simsch 1mo ago
You dont, but you have to acknowledge that theres a good number of people who will just discard your texts from now on. I wont start to do analysis on every text i ever see because thats not feasable. So i choose the easy tells and take false positives as sad but cheaper than my other options.
burnt-resistor 1mo ago
Forget lynch mobs and misdirected, projected rage of others. Integrity means not changing because of the fashions or abuse by others. Fuck them. Use all the dashes.

somat 1mo ago

Probably a stupid question, but what is your mechanical process? that is, how do you make entering a em-dash natural? Personally, I am of the nature that if it does not live on my keyboard I am probably not going to use the character, And I say this as a great aficionado and maintainer of a carefully curated compose key file... That I never use. Guesses, because I like to guess, replace the dash with an em-dash? map alt+dash? compose-key dash dash dash?(my preferred method), dash dash rewrite rule(now we are getting into science fiction), ligature?

manwe150 1mo ago
Use a Mac or iphone? The opt-dash key combo has mapped to em-dash for a long time, and I think you can now just long press the dash key too. The opt key doesn’t scale beyond the hundred or so extra characters it gives space to live on the keyboard, but it sure is a lot better than memorizing Unicode code points, and the rest I can get from the Fn (or Fn-E), which activates a Unicode search panel just about everywhere. I don’t know which Linux toolkits do something similar, and Windows Character Map seems to be somehow even worse than I remember from several decades ago.
- schopra909 1mo ago
  Yep on iPhone I just use two dashes —- and it looks like an emdash
- graftak 1mo ago
  That’s an en-dash, used to denote a range, i.e. 1950–1975. The em-dash includes the shift key as well.

simsch 1mo ago

You dont, but you have to acknowledge that theres a good number of people who will just discard your texts from now on. I wont start to do analysis on every text i ever see because thats not feasable. So i choose the easy tells and take false positives as sad but cheaper than my other options.

burnt-resistor 1mo ago

Forget lynch mobs and misdirected, projected rage of others. Integrity means not changing because of the fashions or abuse by others. Fuck them. Use all the dashes.