This is not the first treatise on this subject to make it to the hn front page.

The problem is, I don't recognise it has having ever been a big thing. I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes. Semi-colons are just as rare. I think both were always niche.

> The problem is, I don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.

This is not a problem. Or rather, it is not a problem in the way that I think you mean.

Em dashes do not need to be a big thing to be useful, which they are; they also do not need anyone's personal recognition to do their jobs.

The problem may, in fact, be that they used to be more of a niche punctuation mark that people were not very familiar with. Now that LLMs have fallen in love with them and throw them around like candy, if people have hardly ever seen them used in well-written text before, they might treat them alone as a much stronger signal for LLM generation than they should — which is precisely what is bringing em-dashes under fire these days, and hence results TFA.

So, yes, indeed, in some ways the problem is, that you don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.

> I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes.

They are more prevalent in nonfiction.

It depends on who and what you read. Since they became controversial, I notice them more. Charles Dickens used them both regularly--most pages seem to have both.

Virginia Woolf's writing has the most semi-colons I've seen and almost as many em-dashes. It fits her stream of consciousness style where there are very few hard stops.

Jack Vance used semi-colons in almost the opposite fashion to increase the tempo by having short clauses without using conjunctions. His action scenes are sometimes almost staccato.

Just today I'm reading Patricia McKillip and noticed she also used a lot of em-dashes.

I use semi-colons frequently, probably at least a half dozen times/week.

Em-dashes not so much, but I'm so deathly sick of people complaining that some piece of text must be LLM-generated that I feel the need to start using it as well.