Author failed to explain the dash universe and their semantic assignments.

- em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — <declaration>)

- en dash: expresses a range (1–100)

- dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley)

I'd also like to see more concise philosophy around em v. ellipsis, "limerance" is poetic (and ironically antithetical to this "essay" … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is personal.

I offer this feedback as a humorously offended fan of all sidecar prose (dash, ellipsis, parens, quotes, and meta typographical treatments) pre-AI era.

Finally, I'd love to hear from this author regarding modern use of period in modern comunication, with canonical use-case of bulleted list as example.

> - dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley)

That's a hyphen, and (to be pedantic) style guides usually do not consider it a dash.

There's also the 2-em dash in some style guides for redacting words, and since care needs to be taken to avoid a line wrap between the em dashes, Unicode has a character for it: ⸺

Finally,

> - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — <declaration>)

This use is sometimes discouraged by style guides, and in many cases, it can be replaced with a colon, comma, or semicolon.

In general, even before AI, the em dash is often considered overused.[0] My guess is that the em dash is perceived as sounding educated, so novice writers who learn about it end up using it recklessly, and LLMs could've picked up this habit from them.

[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...

I just know that MS-Word will replace a hyphen with an em dash in practical use, which is a big part of why I didn't really pick it out as an AI thing in general. Though AI, in particular Chat GPT, does tend to use a lot of them.

Fun fact! Where a compound term is formed by joining two nouns of equal importance — such as Sarbanes–Oxley or attorney–client privilege — an en-dash, not a hyphen, should be used.

Furthermore, the conventions for the first (parenthetical) use case, as far as I understand, are either em-dash without spaces (Anglosphere convention), or en-dash with adjoining spaces (Continental convention: German, French, etc.), but rarely em-dash with spaces (as in the article).

Not to forget the chōonpu ー to mark elongated vowels in Japanese.

Konnichiwaー

With HTML, I can do everything as a <div> and the eyeball reader doesn't know/care. Where it matters is that I'm stripping semantic meaning, which hurts computers and possible accessibility devices.

Most of my life, the same has been true about dashes. I use - for every one of the kinds you provided because - lives on my keyboard.

Is there real value in caring? Does it have the same semantic—stripping effect for computers/accessibility devices? The part of me wondering if I really should care is trying to suss out if this is a real problem or just an argument for semantics pedantics.

I’m surprised to see that you put spaces around the em dash in your example.

Sounds like you'll appreciate my favorite related bit of typographic dash pedantry, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...

If you want to be official about things, use the en dash to replace a hyphen in compound adjectives when at least one of the elements is a two-word compound.

    the pre–Websterburg Bakery era

n.b. I don't know how to code an endash here. Would love to learn!

In many countries around the world, em dashes also express dialogue!

I grew up reading novels and plays

Inspector Lestrade and Holmes were speaking:

— What’s up?

— Not much

— Cool.

Which one is the minus symbol?

which one of those is a hyphen?