A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash

Ouch. I'll restore the original link as I can't change the submission.

Restored.

... and the content is genuinely funny too.

In principle, an em dash is supposed to be used where most people use hyphens. That's why Word/LaTeX make it easy to use:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...

Why stop at emdash? You should be able to type as long a dash as you want just by holding the - key down longer.

> I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes.

They are more prevalent in nonfiction.

I use semi-colons frequently, probably at least a half dozen times/week.

Em-dashes not so much, but I'm so deathly sick of people complaining that some piece of text must be LLM-generated that I feel the need to start using it as well.

It depends on who and what you read. Since they became controversial, I notice them more. Charles Dickens used them both regularly--most pages seem to have both.

Virginia Woolf's writing has the most semi-colons I've seen and almost as many em-dashes. It fits her stream of consciousness style where there are very few hard stops.

Jack Vance used semi-colons in almost the opposite fashion to increase the tempo by having short clauses without using conjunctions. His action scenes are sometimes almost staccato.

Just today I'm reading Patricia McKillip and noticed she also used a lot of em-dashes.

I'm 63 and tend to communicate in full sentences, that often include semi-colons and differentiate between - and -- based on context.

I asked Perplexity in a months long development task that is both complex and complicated what punctuation I should utilize to minimize token and computational cost to get best results, and using semi-colons to delineate related requests in a single prompt was best. Separate prompts for different aspects of the specific projects, or double spaces between sentences. Placing commas inside or outside quotes wasn't mentioned. But third most important, according to Perplexity, was capitalizing important words even if they weren't proper nounds, which I did not expect but now fear I will over-use (I still write thank-you letters by hand, so YMMV!)

> The problem is, I don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.

This is not a problem. Or rather, it is not a problem in the way that I think you mean.

Em dashes do not need to be a big thing to be useful, which they are; they also do not need anyone's personal recognition to do their jobs.

The problem may, in fact, be that they used to be more of a niche punctuation mark that people were not very familiar with. Now that LLMs have fallen in love with them and throw them around like candy, if people have hardly ever seen them used in well-written text before, they might treat them alone as a much stronger signal for LLM generation than they should — which is precisely what is bringing em-dashes under fire these days, and hence results TFA.

So, yes, indeed, in some ways the problem is, that you don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.

[delayed]

I agree we all ought to use available punctuation marks correctly. That said, I am compelled to lodge a formal complaint against quoted text arbitrarily assimilating punctuation from its surrounding context.

Quoted text is a sacred verbatim reproduction of its original source. Good authors are very careful to insert [brackets] around words inserted to clarify or add context, and they never miss an oppurtunity (sic) to preserve the source's spelling or grammatical mistakes. And yet quoted text can just suck in a period, comma, or question mark from its quoted context, simply handing the quoting author the key to completely overturn the meaning of a sentence?! Nonsense! Whatever is between the quotes had better be an exact reproduction, save aforementioned exceptions and their explicit annotations. And dash that pathetic “bUt mUH aEstHeTIcS!” argument on the rocks!

“But it's ugly!”, says you.

“Your shallow subjective opinion of the visual appearance of consecutive exclamation point, right quote, and comma (among other so-called ugly punctuation sequences) is irrelevant in the face of the immense opportunity for misbehavior this piffling preference provides perfidious publications.”, says I.

   "Hello," he said.  
   "Hello", he said.

And two spaces after a period! Who's with me?

Agreed. Good typography is good writing.

I am all for using proper typographic symbols, but it is unclear what place the precomposed ellipsis U+2026—what I assume you mean by “true ellipsis”—has in that canon, especially with the compressed form it takes in most fonts.

And text figures! And proper small caps!!

En dash for ranges is too easily confused for a minus sign. I would rather use a different symbol altogether.

I’m pretty sure Word’s autocorrect for space dash space is endash not emdash, no?

it’s usually space dash dash space across most word processors.

I picked up the habit a couple years ago of just undoing the autocorrect to an em dash and leaving it as two dashes to avoid accusations -- now it’s stuck with me

If you're on windows and have a numeric keypad, it's alt-0150.

Word’s autocorrect inserts en-dashes.

You sign like this:

— drob518

I totally agree!

When I was growing up, I saw plays also use it like this:

  The two are in a room.
  -- Some guy says this
  -- The other guy says that

You just don't see em-dashes used like they used to -- and it shows!

That's an intentional overcorrection for humor

Have you ever noticed some people can't even use basic punctuation like question marks.

"In protest, I wrote [1] a plugin to convert all hyphens in this blog to em—dashes. Even ones that really should just be hyphens."

Here's another one: "I can't be bothered to use em-dash?"

    Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
    Enlarge, diminish, interline;
    Be mindful, when Invention fails;
    To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.

    Your poem finish'd, next your Care
    Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
    In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
    Set off with num'rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—

― Swift, Jonathan (1733). On Poetry; a rapsody

Is it worth it?

What about the poor negative sign? Nothing is more grating to my eye than using the hyphen in a plot.

Maybe, but the problem with both em dash and en dash is that they are impossible to type on a typical keyboard layout. The hyphen, however, is not. Thus I'm going to keep using the hyphen because it's what I have a key for.

Or maybe they’ve been there all along and you just notice them more now because you’re looking for them.

> I think it revealed something deep about the use of it that was always really cringe

A punctuation mark was “cringe”? Seriously? Is this middle school?

The whole point is not to change one's writing style simply because it has been associated with LLMs. Don't feed the paranoia!

Huh, I've observed the opposite, AI-generated text uses spaces most of the time. Might depend on language? Style guides I use (like Chicago) don't put spaces between em dashes so those always stand out immediately to me.

The typography I learned insists on no spaces

I mean, you just used a spurious one in your reply. A period would have been fine.

Sounds like a race to the bottom to me. If you know how to write well, keep at it.

> teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this comes from?

No. It comes from the fact that Americans are functionally illiterate and genuinely have no idea how to use or interpret em dashes or semicolons. They don't use them and don't expect anyone else to use them. The only time Americans see these punctuations are in the handful of classic books they're required to skim to pass high school English class.

Mostly they're a pain to enter on our keyboards.

> America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify

I think so. Strunk & White is distinctly American. You see simplicity encouraged by others, including Virgina Tufte (_Syntax as Style_), and her well-known son Edward Tufte.

When I was learning to write, em dashes were not even touched on. The idea that exotic punctuation could be required to express cogent thoughts in academia would get laughed out of the room.

Says the LLM itself.

(Yes, the proclamation was written by Gemini. I gave it some guidance - that's it).

Says anyone who has seen them at work. They very obviously do not possess intelligence with how often they fall over at basic tests that would never trip up a human. For example, the "how many r's are in the word 'strawberry'" test. No person who is literate in English would fail this, but LLMs do (or did, until the companies making them put in a kludge because they were embarrassed by how it revealed the stupidity of their models).

I will now be adopting em—dashes everywhere, just to spite people who are contrarian about the backlash against the backlash against LLMs using them

I type Compose Hyphen Hyphen, which is pretty quick and easy!

(One might feel that normal keyboards don't have a compose key.)

> Well the em dash remains difficult to type on a normal keyboard

Not on Mac:

hyphen/dash: -

En-dash: ⌥-

Em-dash: ⇧⌥-

Easy on windows: press and hold the alt key, and then 0151 on the numeric keypad.