Human Writers Have Always Used the Em Dash
Key topics
The article argues that human writers have always used em dashes, countering the notion that their use is indicative of AI-generated content, sparking a debate among commenters about the validity of this claim and the role of AI in writing.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
3h
Peak period
105
60-72h
Avg / period
20.9
Based on 146 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 12, 2025 at 4:06 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 12, 2025 at 6:48 PM EDT
3h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
105 comments in 60-72h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 19, 2025 at 8:42 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
I frequently am accused of using LLMs to write my prose, something that I not only eschew, but also believe is morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest.
I’m not above spellcheck, grammar checkers, or even LLM driven evaluation of articles, but my thoughts, word choices, and structure are always of my own design.
I use the em-dash where it is appropriate.
I find that people accusing writers of using AI typically disagree with the premise of the text, and use the “AI” character assault as a method of dehumanising the author and dismissal of their work. The assertion is very rarely made in good faith, but rather is used as a weak attempt to discredit an idea without actually refuting the premise or even examining the argument.
Shame on whoever argues in this way, it’s weak, unproductive, and intellectually lazy. It’s fine to disagree, but if you aren’t willing to act in good faith, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You’re only going to discredit your own point of view if you touch the keyboard.
For lack of an easy way to type it on my computer I tend to use parentheses (which effectively serve the same purpose) but will opt for an em dash more often when typing on my phone at the risk of bookish messages and notes.
Coworkers have emailed me before suggesting a certain course of action which I can tell is heavily influenced by an LLM. "I think we should X because Y" to which I just think "Is this really what you know and believe?". If I wanted an LLM to answer I could have asked it myself. But I don't accuse — I ask for more evidence or a better argument because if I'm forced to work with an LLM by proxy I am going to reflect the burden of dealing with one back to the author.
That being said, fyi, most Linux distros (or at least many!) have by default the shortcut `ctrl+shift+U` then the hex value of the Unicode character.
So, for example, the en dash is U+2013 and the em dash is U+2014, so you would press `ctrl+shift+U` then type in "2014" then space and it inputs it!
I use it all the time! It's very useful!
I don't think use of an em dash is indicative in itself of AI assistance, but rather, the change to using them. Did this person all of a sudden start using them? There are also other things to look at, like how certain bullet point lists have emphasis (for key phrases, being bold, when previously the author didn't do so, stylistically).
I write a lot (as a PM) - I've taken to using MacWhisper, which does local AI dictation, but also (at my configuration) sends it to a ChatGPT prompt first:
"You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to refine and polish the given transcript as follows:
1. Correct any spelling errors.
2. Fix grammatical mistakes.
3. Improve punctuation where necessary.
4. Ensure consistent formatting.
5. Clarify ambiguous phrasing without changing the meaning.
6. If a sentence or paragraph is overly verbose and has more than negligible redundancy, lightly edit for brevity.
7. If the transcript contains a question, edit it for clarity but do not provide an answer.
Please return only the cleaned-up version of the transcript. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edits."
This is great. I get the benefits of pretty accurate transcription while getting a first pass at copyediting almost in real time. It did require me to make some tweaks to my dictation process (allowing it to "chew" on larger chunks to give better context to its editing), but it works very well.
I’m sort of surprised they haven’t always been widespread. They are great for making asides without losing energy-the voice in my head somehow has the same volume after an em-dash (unlike parentheses, which are quieter).
> Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my — conscience.
---
In any case, the "en-dash", as you seem to suggest, is not equivalent to the "em-dash", but typically used to express ranges or contrast between two words, i.e. "1990–1992" or "push–pull configuration".
In Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic style – pretty much a bible amongst typographers – he states:
We should “[u]se spaced en dashes – rather than close-set em dashes or spaced hyphens – to set off phrases.” Bringhurst then adds this devastating indictment:
The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.
Edit: I dug out the original text of your translated phrase to see if it was Stirner’s or the translator’s use of em-dashes, and it looks like it was direct from Stirner: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_sQ5RAAAAcAAJ_2/page/n89/m...
Personally, I'm more prone to excessive semicolon usage, which seems to aggravate editors.
They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.
But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
Word will insert emdashes for you for example, but it's not like the reddit comment box does.
It works the same way on a Mac (key repeat off) or by pressing option+shift+hyphen (key repeat on).
Yet now my hard-earned attention to detail attracts nothing but false accusations...
But nothing I type in a web form would have them.
grating over pasta hills,
savory blizzard.
(/s)
I am. Em-dashes, like all punctuation, were invented at some point. Even the space didn't always exist, and the em-dash is a lot more recent than that.
And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.
I use em dashes and semicolons and ellipses and parentheses a lot, although I barely make the leaderboard¹. My doctor says I'm human. In the pre-Unicode era of Usenet and mailing lists I used ‘ -- ’ for a long dash.
¹ https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
Forms distinguished by width weren’t added to computer keyboards as separate keys because computer keyboards, like typewriters, solidified when computer displays were monospaced. (And, like other forms like proper opening and closing quotes, limited space on the keyboard was a concern.)
Typewriters were monospaced, which gives you extremely limited scope for distinguishing hyphens and em dashes. Small wonder that they didn’t bother attempting a distinction, and then that provided the inertia for us to never get such a thing now.
Typewriters are a lowest-common-denominator sort of thing. They lacked all kinds of widely-used stuff, and some of it they killed by their omission. Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all, and the rest of the time could only do by a terrible hack.
There’s a similar story in the final death of the letter thorn (þ) in English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl...>: imported fonts lacked the character, so people substituted it with y which looked most similar, and that substitution became ubiquitous, and now most people think the first word in “Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe” is pronounced /jiː/ (“ye”), whereas it was actually just how they spelled “the”, so it was /ðiː/.
It’s a general rule in such technologies: although they make many new things possible, they also damage what was there before.
Typewriters supported accented letters better than modern keyboards do. I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward, or there was a separate key to move the same space back, so you could basically put any symbol above any letter. Kinda like how LaTeX does it.
This is normal for particular characters on non-English typewriters. Those were ‘dead keys’, ‘dead’ because the carriage didn't move. Equivalent keyboard layouts today also have dead keys. Modern dead keys can also be ‘better’, for instance, I'm told Brazil likes the dead ´ to produce á é í ó ú but also ç.
And that key was called Backspace.
Yeah, it's where I learned to use em-dashes as well.
> In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
Hmmm… For sure I use em-dashes in HN comments. I am not sure that I mentally differentiate as to whether I am in one scenario or another. (But to be sure I am not likely to leave an Amazon review though — so perhaps those contexts you called out self-select.)
But my point about the article not being convincing is just this: I can share my anecdotal evidence, you can too, we all go in a circle and it gets us nowhere. What I was expecting when I clicked the link was some actual data on dash prevalence in casual writing such as YouTube comments and a conclusion based on that data. What I got was more "Well if you look at this very particular kind of writing then extrapolate that to cover all writing then my point is made."
Imaging you're an artist designing a character with 6 fingers today.
The situation is really sad. People who have the proper skills have to change how they work just to avoid "witch hunting" (for the lack of better term). What's next? If GPT-5.5 uses a lot of ellipses, are we going to stop using them? Semicolon? Will humans be using the most watered-down subset of English only at some point?
At least, that’s what I’m doing.
The key part is having the good judgement and maturity to see when that point is.
Of course people use the em-dash, and of course LLMs use them at least 10x-100x more than your average human writer. Also, they add nothing to writing, 99.8% people just use an en-dash when typing where an em-dash would be used in print, and absolutely nothing is lost. Some dickheads (like myself) have used a compose key (or similar) to use actual em-dashes in order to seem sophisticated online.
The only people who need the em-dash, as far as I know, are Spanish-language writers. As for LLM-shaming, isn't it more shameful when you publish an article that could easily be entirely written by LLM, but definitely wasn't, like this one?
edit: articles like this make me want to misuse flagging.
Or like me, because they grew up in a different location, era, or career path where proper typography, spelling, grammar, and punctuation matter more than it does for most (print, web dev, advertising, etc) and now the use of that compose-key is just pure muscle-memory like high-speed "touch typing" is.
I just thought it was cool when I learned that there were glyphs with names that indicated how wide they were.
And I believe the letter "x" is the standard for determining font height? Someone can correct me.
If you encounter an em-dash in an online discussion, most likely someone went to extra effort to include it, or it was automatically inserted, possibly by an AI.
There are other signs that you're looking at AI-generated texts, like lists of three, a certain turn of phrase, or vague generalities, but those are easier for a human to type than an em-dash.
I expect most people who use emdashes in casual writing are people who have done a lot of reading and a substantial amount of writing too (professionally or otherwise), who are also tech-savvy enough to understand that it's possible to easily insert symbols that aren't printed on the keys of your keyboard. These are the people you're filtering out when you decide to use emdashes as your primary signal for deciding whether text was written by AI or not, and I think that's pretty stupid. In your haste to avoid content written by AIs you're filtering content written by people who care about writing, which leaves content written by people who don't, and content written by genAI systems told not to use emdashes, which you will naturally be far less suspicious of because you're fixated on the emdash thing.
I generally think it's terrible that genAI slop is displacing human writing, however useful I might LLMs for other tasks. In that, I probably agree with a lot of the people using emdashes as a negative signal. But the fact is that this widespread attitude toward emdashes can only accelerate that displacement, by tarring high quality human writing as suspicious while giving cleverly manipulated LLM output a pass.
Shift option dash.
Sent from my iPhone 4 using Tapatalk
Smart quotes are trickier, because the shortcuts are unfortunately unintuitive IMO. I forget what the original ones are, but they involve the [ and ] keys. I've actually remapped them using Karabiner-Elements so that option [ and ] are single quotes and shift option [ and ] double quotes.
(Personally I put the open quotes on ` and the close quotes on ', along with using Apple-style dash layout.)
On Android and iOS, you press and hold the "-" to get the "–" and "—" options.
On Mac, use opt + hyphen for "–" and opt + shift + hyphen for "—" (similar to other special characters).
On Linux you can enable the compose key and use it similar to MacOS (Compose+---).
It's not rocket science.
All the best,
-HG
So that’s just a bad signal
i have espanso set up to quick replace "-=" with — on desktop and on my phone i use futo keyboard, which has the aesthetically inspring em dash one hold and swipe on the h key away.
My point is that if you/we treat things "statically" we're missing the point. It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).
> It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).
True, and it goes both ways. As the cultural backlash to AI grows (see terms for it like Generative Slop, Bullshit Oracles, Regression Engines, etc) so too does people's desire to both identify and differentiate themselves from AI content and/or content that appears AI-esque.
So just know there is a significant subsection of the population that will clock such writing styles and will immediately dismiss and/or react negatively to your messages not on merit, but on "smell".
The reason em dashes are a giveaway for AI generated text is simply because there is no em dash key on the keyboard - only an en dash key. The dash I used in that last sentence was an en dash, not an em dash.
Some publishing applications (including Microsoft Word) will automatically convert en dashes to em dashes where appropriate. But most email apps, chat apps, online posts/comments, and practically any application not designed for writing actual printed publications will not do that conversion for you. And without a dedicated key, it is far too cumbersome for most people to bother. They will just leave it as an en dash.
So yes, the em dash is still a reliable indicator of AI-generated content in many contexts.
But I agree that because LLMs are trained on public documents, and most of those are written in Microsoft Word which has auto-format enabled by default, that is probably the source of so many LLMs using them.
Almost nobody, relatively speaking, even knows they exist, let alone goes out of their way to figure out the ALT code combination to use them. Most people can’t get their, they’re, and there right.
You are right. Thanks for catching that.
I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.
AACK!
One day this whole thing is going to read like the 1980's where you could tell if a latter was written by a "real" typist and not a word processor by the lack of correction liquid/tape.
All of this is distracting from the real question, which is:
Why do you care if it was AI generated?
As long as my comment reflects what I intended to say, you shouldn't care if I wrote it or the AI wrote it. Did it offend you in the past if an HN commenter used Grammarly to help craft the comment?
This is the literary equivalent of an ad hominem attach.
Em-dashes are a great way to signal something—thought or extra context—were inject into normal sentences flow. It can make the text appear more conversational
I realise Harry Potter roleplaying forums are not really your "normal" crowd though lol
I'm not prolific enough to rank on this leaderboard, but I often use the em dash in comments/posts/texts and have for years—especially on my phone, since it's easiest to reach from a mobile keyboard.
There's nothing elegant about a punctuation mark firmly glued to the words on either side, making a sequoia-sized typographic log that typically gets wrapped in its entirety to the next line, leaving a half mile or so of white space just hanging in space before the wrap.
If you're gonna use the em dash, make sure your software can break a line on either side of one.
I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).
I think the main reason people are noticing it now is because most writing has moved away from legacy tools like Word. Websites like Twitter don't do that character substitution, so it has become quite obvious when text is being pasted from another place...for example, AI generated content.
And yet here we ware.
Newspapers generally avoid it, even avoiding it completely in favour of commas. Properly wielding the n-dash or the m-dash requires training.
OTOH, as long as user-interactive web content has existed—so “always” in a context of a particular view of the online world—em-dashes have been part of it, because the facilities that make it easy to use (whether automatic replacement, or various keyboard input modifying mechanisms) have been sufficiently common that a robust minority of users have regularly used one or more of them.
In certain contexts, em dashes are perfectly natural and human. That being said, everyone has encountered articles and posts that read so obviously like AI, and in those contexts the presence of numerous em dashes is certainly an additional data point.
But I think worst of all it just gives me the fucking creeps, some uncanny-valley bullshit. I see hyphens a million times a day then out of nowhere comes this creepy slender-man looking motherfucker that's just a little bit too long than you'd expect or like, and is always touching all the letters around it when it shouldn't need to. It stands out looking like a weird print error... on my screen! Hopefully it keeps building a worse and worse reputation.