onehundredsixtynineNew accounts on HN 10x more likely to use EM-dashes
I started using emdash when it was popularized by AI and everyone complained and then authors explained how and why they used it and I learned. It’s great punctuation.
I’ve used it extensively almost all my life. I love it. But I have largely stopped since the advent of LLMs. I’ve also changed my uses of bullets. I will now rarely do a flat bulleted list. I will either write sentences or do a nested list.
I don’t think those things are bad, but I see them so much in llm writing that they have, for now, become ugly to me.
I know a person who’s been using it a lot in their writing all their life and now went back to school for a degree in philsophy and got told their work was obviously generated by an LLM. So yay, em-dashes can now ruin your grade.