I've been using em dashes since long before LLMs existed, and I won't stop. Some people might think it's a sign of an LLM, but I know it's just a sign of their own short-sightedness.

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AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's really frustrating to have to adjust my writing style to seem more human despite being entirely human. Many of us have been using em dashes for a long time, who else do people think the LLMs learnt it from?

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d4rkp4ttern 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. I think the whole emdash thing is a nonsense meme propagated by Xfluencers or LinkFluencers.

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viccis 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Em dashes are fine in throwaway casual writing like internet comments or tweets or whatever. However, I think that, in any writing that is significant enough that LLM usage is scrutinized, they often just come across as a crutch to avoid more planned out sentence flow. I think it's actually a good thing that people are feeling like they should cut down on them.

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caconym_ 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Wrong. They show up in some of the best and most widely and intensely read prose that exists, with good reason. Of course, like any tool, they can be misused by people who don't know better.

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viccis 4 days ago | parent [-]

You wanna cite any sources for that?

I don't know of any prose that relies on crutch dashes

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AlecSchueler 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Pretty much any good work of literature? Or any technical document? Framing them as "crutch dashes" doesn't instantly make them so.

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caconym_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

To make sure I wasn't posting out of my ass i opened Gravity's Rainbow to 4 or 5 random pages. All confirmed what I said above.

Maybe you should read more widely. It's good for the brain!

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viccis 2 days ago | parent [-]

>Gravity's Rainbow

>widely and intensely read prose

Dunno about that.

Pynchon's prose is notably colloquial, complete with lots of ellipses. Congrats on your Big Boy Book™ though.

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caconym_ 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's just a book, man. Maybe you should read more widely; it might even cure you of the obscenely stupid opinion you've expressed here.

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viccis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm widely read. Enough that I'm not a pseud trying to imply that I read a lot of super duper hard books as evidence that my midwit opinion on emdashes is better than the guy here who made me mad by criticizing them.

Let me know if you're so stoked at reading Infinite Jest that you think that's proof I'm wrong.

	▲	caconym_ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You made this claim above: > I don't know of any prose that relies on crutch dashes If that's true then you are not widely read, and if it's false then you are a disingenuous troll and your comments here are exactly as worthless as they look. Either way your opinion is still bad. Sorry you're mad about it, but I'm done here.

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AlecSchueler a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This comment is really below the standards one might expect here, a total and hominem. Why don't you open one of your own big boy books and tell us which one it was that used no em dashes?

	▲	viccis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh no I did a and hominem My whole point was that opening "big boy books" doesn't actually make a point about the validity of a thing. That's just argumentum ad populum.

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zahlman 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This issue, as I understand it, is about the actual choice to use an emdash character (—) rather than a hyphen (-), and about the effort involved in doing so. It's not about sentence structure.

I don't really understand how AI developed a bias towards doing it correctly rather than doing it the lazy way. But hearing so much about emdashes qua LLM detection mechanism eventually just got me to decide that typing an ordinary hyphen really is just lazy. And then I ended up configuring my system to make it reasonably easy to type them.

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fluidcruft 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, we smart people were using en and em dashes appropriately long before LLMs mimics appeared.

Latex power users unite against the markdown monkey keyboard mashers!

So... sorry (not sorry!) that LLMs try to be like us and not the heathens.