Kagan MacTane (he/him)I've been writing using em dashes since the 1990s. The reason AI uses em dashes is because it was trained on my writing, and that of countless other humans like me.
Jeff Atwood@kagan This is an absolutely brilliant illustration of the core issue
@codinghorror Thank you! 😊
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦@kagan @raganwald so, you're the culprit behind those cursed m-dashes?
Please explain: why were normal dashes insufficient? What need did m-dash fill? And why are there no spaces around them?
#neverMdash
Please explain: why were normal dashes insufficient? What need did m-dash fill? And why are there no spaces around them?
#neverMdash
> why were normal dashes insufficient? What need did m-dash fill?
Here's a decent quick guide to the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes: https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/types-of-dashes/
@kagan @raganwald aha. So, it seems I can continue to ignore m-dashes:
'it typically takes the place of certain other punctuation marks: namely commas, parentheses, colons, and semicolons."
… since I am a big fan of using commas, parentheses, colons, and semicolons.
Jens Kube@Naturtrueb @deborahh @raganwald Haha, yes. Good point!
Typography is nuts, huh?
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐@kagan The only people who don't regularly use em dashes are people who use Windows, because it's the only common operating system that makes it practically impossible to type them.
(It's ALT+0151, *if* you have a full keyboard.)
And the sad thing is, Windows has been the most popular OS for over 35 years, now, so most people never learned how to properly use typography on a computer.
I suggest "The Mac is Not a Typewriter" (1995), by Robin Williams, for people who didn't get the memo.
Aaron Toponce ⚛️
@kagan I've been using em dashes for years. Then I got curious when to use em dashes versus en dashes versus hyphens. Merriam-Webster to the rescue!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use
Seán Fenian@kagan My books were used by Meta to train their AI. Despite a copyright declaration explicitly forbidding it.
Janeishly@kagan Someone Swedish started writing to me (in English) about ten days ago using em dashes. I immediately asked if they were using genAI, because it's very rare for Swedes (or indeed anyone in Europe) to use unspaced dashes. They insist not, but still every message is florid, repetitive - and jammed full of em dashes. I smell an AI rat.
@Janeishly Ask them to swear? (Not really joking.)
@kagan Ha, good idea!
Michael Gisiger 
@Janeishly @kagan That is not true. European here, Switzerland. I learned the correct usage of hyphens, en- and em-dashes in my English classes at school.
German typography also uses hyphens (Viertelgeviertstrich) and en-dashes (Halbgeviertstrich). Em-dashes (Geviertstrich) aren't used that much anymore, but they should be used for lists (which are called Spiegelstrichlisten).
@gisiger @kagan Oh, of course some people did learn it, but it's most unusual to see anyone using them in casual chat. Even a lot of translators (usually extremely fussy about such things) often only use hyphens where they mean en dashes. And this was ostensibly someone who learned English in the UK, but who was using American spellings and em dashes. (There were other things that made me go "Hm", but these were the main ones.)
@Janeishly @gisiger I use them in casual chat... but I'll happily cop to being "unusual".
The Other Brook@kagan If using em dashes is a sign of being AI then I must have been assimilated about the time I started using word processors in the late '80s.
When I first started writing for the web and dealing with browser limitations I got used to coworkers coming over and asking me for the "ASCII code" because they could never remember it. I gave up trying to tell them that — is actually an HTML character entity and besides technically what they were calling "ASCII" was ISO 8859-1.
Wait... re-reading that maybe I am AI... how long has it been since I flunked an "I Am Not a Robot" captcha?
J.D. MacLeod 🇨🇦@kagan emdashes rule!
potpie@kagan Ana Colouthon approves
Mark T. Tomczak@kagan And if I don't have them natively in the tool, I will use three hyphens.
From my cold dead hands. I gave up two spaces after the period; they cannot take this from me.
TL JordanI am the em dash!
Mike Smale@kagan I’m a poet, I use em dashes all the time
Ericka Simone@kagan @MichaelTBacon the way I love em dashes. Thank you so much for this. lmaoooo
MegatronicThronBanks@kagan I use n-dashes, m are just too wanky. I also use them too much.
Lyrial@kagan The sad thing is that most people can't distinguish the difference. In fact, I'd argue that for everything outside of collegiate usages it doesn't matter --even if you use it in an edge case to invoke a parentheses--.
MW1CFN@kagan I'd be pretty lost without em dashes!
Morten@kagan The nd urge to use em dash (and parentheses of course).
@kagan Wait, I'm not making assumptions about your n—just me
Patrick O'Beirne@kagan
An LLM walks into a bar.
Bartender: "What are you having?"
LLM: "What's everyone else having? "
An LLM walks into a bar.
Bartender: "What are you having?"
LLM: "What's everyone else having? "
@PatrickOBeirne Oooh, I like this! 😄
Allen but one of the good ones@kagan *pulls hair* my wife runs into this all the frikking time. She's a professional, experienced, commercial copywriter. She, and others like her, write all the stuff you see on commercial websites (and other things), which are considered "Trustworthy" and "Reliable" by big search engines and so are weighted heavily by AI scrapers, which is why she gets flagged by bullshit ChatGPT detection tools when clients get a bee in their bonnet about this AI stuff and decide to check if their very expensive digital marketing agency is trying to cheat them.
(They're totally cheating them, but not like that. The cheat is charging millions of rands per week to pay one writer, one designer, and 25 managers to pre-generate a month's worth of instagram posts that a a professional influencer agency will ask their Top Movers with 15000 followers to post on their behalf. The writer's and designer's salaries are the cheapest line items on that invoice)
dr_barnowlAnd because Word auto"correct"s single dashes to em dashes.
Arthur David OlsonI've ended electronic mail with "--ado" since the 1980s when, pre-Unicode, an em dash was unavailable in 7-bit ASCII. Thus my account name.
breakfast@kagan I like an em-dash too, but when they're used in series I find that they can be hard to understand. Then parentheses are better. Or, like in Spanish, they can be written like parentheses: "I wrote --with my blue pen-- an email"
Conor C. Peterson 
@kagan This resurgence of the em-dash in popular thought has -- on the brighter side -- given me the perfect punctuation mark that I felt was missing from my writing.
I do, however, keep getting stuck on whether it would be more grammatically apt to use an em-dash, a comma, or just a full stop into a new sentence at any given moment in my writing...
Disco Inferno