Damn, people, what's the deal with the em dash? You only learned about this stuff now? Back in the 00s I had a design course as part of my main program, and guess what — yeah, we actually studied when to use which: dash, minus, em dash, whatever. That stuff was crucial back then; it was one of those tiny details that separated a “professional” from the average crowd.
So yeah, nothing magical here. AIs just picked up that old “academic-only” knowledge and now use it to… well, to look a bit less average. Lol.
You do realise there are AI checkers online.
https://www.zerogpt.com/ assesses this content as: 27.49% ChatGPT
While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still, (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
Great observation! Not only does ChatGPT produce seemingly human-authored output—humans can also produce ChatGPT-style output.
If you really want to fly below the radar you can even include instructions to adopt a certain writing style, e.g.: you can tell it to use a Gen-Z style with minimal formatting.
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.
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.
As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.
For example, in the article we have:
If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.
Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
I think I took out an extra comma too, which hurts readability.
Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.
I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
There are subjects which naturally lend themselves to “shifts” inter-sentence. Not really technical matters if the technical matter is just a list of specifications: here is how this works by default and if this and that then this happens. More like subjects relating to social issues and philosophy.
A person may have no preconceived notions about what the frobricator does. So you just list it out. But they may have plenty of preconceived notions about some more abstract-but-relatable subject. The writer anticipates that. And they have to navigate this subject at many levels at the same time, either inter-sentence or inter-paragraph; now I am talking about X, but not the X you think [the writer anticipates] but the X in itself. And not the X that group A considers, nor the one that B considers...
These subjects are more common in the “humanities”.
Certainly some authors overdo it and just seem to produce sentences with multiple semicolons and em-dashes because it’s their style/they are showing off. They are not writing clearly.
(Here I am using """""smart quotes""""".[1] Why is no one arresting me for that?)
I think we have seen a rise in the use of more intricate prose among technologists concurrent with the rise of AI penmanship. There’s more “flavor” now. Less of, either, straightforward prose or just boring and stodgy prose. More supposed personality.
Whatever the cause, this could be an emergent property of authors competing for readership by writing on the same subject but in a more supposedly engaging and personal way. And if an author who doesn’t like writing prose but wants to promote something regardless could get help from a program which happens to be literate in English as well? Well. Now it is easier to ramp up the word count.
> > If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
Now the sentence says something different. The original said: If your goal is to get people to read ... And hopefully also enjoy.
Just getting people to read has the primacy in the original.
> > If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
This is certainly how I expect a programmer to write.
> Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
Some groups of people ponder the great questions of life.[2] Programmers ponder if there is really a categorical difference, in principle, between their own consciousness and that of their smart fridge. And whether em-dash users are bots.
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.
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?
> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
<!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
The compose key and Ctrl+K in Vim both assume the use of Linux, or janky 3rd party software. Compose is the same argument I have already covered with Windows, you need to enter a cryptic key-combination into the keyboard, which is not intuitive.
As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.
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.
The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.
People aren't likely to pre-type their HN and reddit comments in a word processor though, so when you see them on such sites, it's a good indication that the comment came from an LLM and not a genuine person.
I’ve typed comments here on this site in Emacs using a Firefox extension. And often I do it manually since I don’t want to lose three paragraphs to the whims of the browser state.
Not that it matters since I type such characters with my keybored directly. There are dozens of us.
Maybe they are using a Mac (where you type alt-hyphen for a emdash)? Or run Windows and have a numeric keypad (ctrl-minus)? Or they run a browser extension like Grammarly that auto-substitutes?
Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2].
You have to take a step back. The first part is not about writing prose. It is about consuming it. And all publishers who are mainstream and respectable use proper English symbols. Now they might use ASCII apostrophe instead of the recommended left single quotation mark. But using a single hyphen or two hyphens or three hyphens for an em-dash is out of the question.
Literacy starts with consuming texts and doesn’t stop once you have learned to read comfortably. People who consume a more varied selection of prose than, say, programming mailing lists will have seen plenty of em-dashes in their time and won’t balk at people using normal punctuation.
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.
I don't know when the phrase "em dash" got popular. It was probably due to web development, because, unless you were into typesetting, nobody knew what "em" was. We always just called them dashes--two hyphens make a dash.
I would go back to the advent of Desktop Publishing. The early Macintosh + Laserwriter really did a number in bringing esoteric terms like "font" to us commoners.
Some of us found out we were typography nerds and didn't know it until then.
Agreed. I've used the em dash for well over a decade and love it, but am having to train myself to not use it simply to not appear as though my text is written by AI.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
Yeah, just writing in Word (and few other) will get your - turned into em dashes. Personally I hate them. Mostly coz of random editors making GNU cmdline options into emdash and so breaking copying but I also think they are ugly, way too long in most fonts
It's okay. Give it a few years and every writing style will be being used by AI. We'll then be able to use whatever style we like as no one will be able to tell our writing from AI anyway.
You know how LLMs are trained on basically the whole internet, right? And thus pretty much the whole reason why LLMs favour em-dashes, is that they are super common on the internet (even pre-LLMs)
