| ▲ | namanyayg an hour ago |
| It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI. I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt. My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI. |
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| ▲ | Buttons840 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's not that hard. Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.) Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking. |
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| ▲ | gerdesj 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When you feel the need to dive in with a dash (m, n or otherwise), why not stop ... think for a while: consider going in with a colon instead? |
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| ▲ | JKCalhoun 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ha ha, now labeled as old — when on a typewriter it was common to use two dashes as a fake em dash. |
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| ▲ | keybored 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves. |
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| ▲ | hekkle 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write. | | |
| ▲ | wlesieutre 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science. If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically. Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor? | |
| ▲ | sfRattan 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you're writing in MS Word, LibreOffice, or most word processors, typing a word and then two dashes and then a word, without any spaces, like--this will generate an em dash automatically. I learned how to do it in Freshman English in high school. Though I was also taught to double space after a period. To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves. | |
| ▲ | askonomm 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Many (most?) WYSIWYG editors automatically convert two hyphens (--) to em dash, no need to specifically look out for it. |
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| ▲ | ants_everywhere 6 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not just less literate, it's also people who feel the need to be amateur prosecutors. It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line. It's been that way throughout history. |
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