Em dash forever! Along with en dash for numerical ranges, true ellipsis not that three-period crap, true typographic quotes, and all the trimmings! Good typography whenever and wherever possible!
I agree we all ought to use available punctuation marks correctly. That said, I am compelled to lodge a formal complaint against quoted text arbitrarily assimilating punctuation from its surrounding context.
Quoted text is a sacred verbatim reproduction of its original source. Good authors are very careful to insert [brackets] around words inserted to clarify or add context, and they never miss an oppurtunity (sic) to preserve the source's spelling or grammatical mistakes. And yet quoted text can just suck in a period, comma, or question mark from its quoted context, simply handing the quoting author the key to completely overturn the meaning of a sentence?! Nonsense! Whatever is between the quotes had better be an exact reproduction, save aforementioned exceptions and their explicit annotations. And dash that pathetic “bUt mUH aEstHeTIcS!” argument on the rocks!
“But it's ugly!”, says you.
“Your shallow subjective opinion of the visual appearance of consecutive exclamation point, right quote, and comma (among other so-called ugly punctuation sequences) is irrelevant in the face of the immense opportunity for misbehavior this piffling preference provides perfidious publications.”, says I.
I am all for using proper typographic symbols, but it is unclear what place the precomposed ellipsis U+2026—what I assume you mean by “true ellipsis”—has in that canon, especially with the compressed form it takes in most fonts.
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 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.
The problem isn’t the em dashes, it’s the overuse of em dashes. Same for all the other ChatGPT-isms - they’re fine when used occasionally for effect, but there’s no variety. It’s always the same punctuation, same grammatical structures, same rhetorical moves, same paragraph lengths... That’s not what writing is supposed to be like and it becomes very grating after a while.
I love em dashes — they are just so pretty. But the en dash also needs more love. 1 out of every, say, 7–15 of the hyphens I see should be en dashes instead.
Argggh! Seeing “tell—tale sign” when it should be “tell-tale sign” is even worse! The point isn't to use punctuation, it's to use punctuation properly!
This use in dialogue is common in Continental European languages, especially Romance languages. I think it's also common in English among writers who were influenced by other European languages?
If you are surrounded by a class of people that makes you genuinely second-guess the optics of your (appropriate) em-dash usage, I think that tells you a lot about what you need to change in your life. Likely you'll be happier in the company of people who know how to pick up a professionally written book or article.
I keep being surprised this is such a big deal on HN, and I have begun to wonder whether this is just a uniquely American conversation.
I grew up among European and other international English speakers and writers, and no one blinks an eye at a semicolon or an em-dash. I'm not saying they use them frequently or overuse them, they simply know how to use them correctly and use them well. Writing without either is like ... cooking without garlic. You can, but it certainly makes affairs a lot more boring.
Now I understand that America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this all comes from, do you think?
> America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify
I think so. Strunk & White is distinctly American. You see simplicity encouraged by others, including Virgina Tufte (_Syntax as Style_), and her well-known son Edward Tufte.
When I was learning to write, em dashes were not even touched on. The idea that exotic punctuation could be required to express cogent thoughts in academia would get laughed out of the room.
> teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this comes from?
No. It comes from the fact that Americans are functionally illiterate and genuinely have no idea how to use or interpret em dashes or semicolons. They don't use them and don't expect anyone else to use them. The only time Americans see these punctuations are in the handful of classic books they're required to skim to pass high school English class.
The drop from 2017 to 2023 is worrying, but my first reaction is to ask if that is only in the US or is it global? I couldn't find 2023 data for other countries, but the 2012-2017 PIAAC literacy data puts USA roughly in line with the rest of the world. I know people dunking on American literacy isn't new, it goes back easily to 2012 or earlier. If the US is illiterate, then so is much of the world.
I've seen far more people complaining about people believing em dashes indicate AI, than people who actually believe that em dashes automatically indicate AI with no other evidence.
I'm on vacation so don't have my copy of Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style at hand, but I'm not sure he would subscribe to this manifesto.
Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)
A weak judgment betrays itself in the indiscriminate use of fine punctuation; for when the em-dash is made universal, it ceases to be distinguished, and becomes merely another form of hyphen.
Let the em-dash remain upon the height of style. Let the hyphen toil in the shade of the valley. And let the en-dash—patient, capable, and unjustly overlooked—at last be admitted to polite society, where it may properly mediate matters of form–function.
I have been using the em dash in writing forever - in Word, for example, you type a word, then space-hyphen-space, then you type another word and the hyphen is autocorrected to an em dash.
I don’t regularly use en-dashes, cause I don’t know how to make them.
it’s usually space dash dash space across most word processors.
I picked up the habit a couple years ago of just undoing the autocorrect to an em dash and leaving it as two dashes to avoid accusations -- now it’s stuck with me
I've noticed people using emdashes more in known non-AI text in what I assume is a smokescreen to maintain plausible deniability when they wholesale copy AI text.
It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.
Most AI generated text doesn't seem to have spaces around the em dashes. I've been using that as a subtle distinguishing marker; as both forms are considered grammatically correct.
Huh, I've observed the opposite, AI-generated text uses spaces most of the time. Might depend on language? Style guides I use (like Chicago) don't put spaces between em dashes so those always stand out immediately to me.
These things are inescapable. In Nov 2019, I helped a friend move. I had a cold and not wanting to get her sick, I wore one of the N95 masks that I had so that I could bicycle in fire season.
By 2022, doing the same would be a political statement.
Yeah, for sure, but without easy way to access it from the keyboard, most don't bother wasting time inserting it.
Smart tools like LibreOffice and above indeed help with it, but in other scenarios, especially common browser usage that's not the case. Compose key is really useful for that, but it's not widely known outside of Linux.
This dates back to the beginning of the Mac, so it's almost 10 years older than FreeBSD. (I'm unfamiliar with other UNIX compose key tooling that may have predated it.)
I used em-dashes regularly. However, since they’ve become associated with LLM-generated text, I’ve stopped using them to avoid the appearance of AI assistance.
Can I have the a reverse filter, that replaces smart quotes, em-dashes and other web filth with something a proper compiler rightfully expects? Nothing like copying code samples from someone's blog, and getting weird errors because the helpful blog software made the typography “prettier“
LLMs completely ruined "—" for me, its not jus that it makes text look generated I think it revealed something deep about the use of it that was always really cringe and just has no reason to exist...
I used to use em-dashes online to seem smart but now that internet addicts are defending them in order to be contrarian about AI slop, I'm abandoning them altogether. I have to finally admit that I actually think they're stupid and I don't want tiny differences in the length of a featureless horizontal line to be grammatically significant.
Especially when there's never any context where you can create a minimal pair between two utterances that would give them a different meaning depending on which dash was used. An em-dash is just a stuck up en-dash. I even hate the terms "em-dash" and "en-dash" now, after the typographical snobbery that flooded the culture for about a decade after web fonts got invented and standardized. Frontend developers and web designers started getting big salaries and buying fancy wines and whiskies, so I had to hear the word "Helvetica" 50x a day.
Cosigned!
Em dash forever! Along with en dash for numerical ranges, true ellipsis not that three-period crap, true typographic quotes, and all the trimmings! Good typography whenever and wherever possible!
I agree we all ought to use available punctuation marks correctly. That said, I am compelled to lodge a formal complaint against quoted text arbitrarily assimilating punctuation from its surrounding context.
Quoted text is a sacred verbatim reproduction of its original source. Good authors are very careful to insert [brackets] around words inserted to clarify or add context, and they never miss an oppurtunity (sic) to preserve the source's spelling or grammatical mistakes. And yet quoted text can just suck in a period, comma, or question mark from its quoted context, simply handing the quoting author the key to completely overturn the meaning of a sentence?! Nonsense! Whatever is between the quotes had better be an exact reproduction, save aforementioned exceptions and their explicit annotations. And dash that pathetic “bUt mUH aEstHeTIcS!” argument on the rocks!
“But it's ugly!”, says you.
“Your shallow subjective opinion of the visual appearance of consecutive exclamation point, right quote, and comma (among other so-called ugly punctuation sequences) is irrelevant in the face of the immense opportunity for misbehavior this piffling preference provides perfidious publications.”, says I.
I am all for using proper typographic symbols, but it is unclear what place the precomposed ellipsis U+2026—what I assume you mean by “true ellipsis”—has in that canon, especially with the compressed form it takes in most fonts.
This is super funny, in an ironic sense. The link is broken because the `em-dash` was replaced by a `dash`. The direct link is https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/a-proclamation-regardi...
Ouch. I'll restore the original link as I can't change the submission.
Restored.
... and the content is genuinely funny too.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
I feel like programmers use semi-colons more often; we're more familiar with them.
Erlang (and probably Prolog, but my memories there are fuzzy) use periods, commas, and semi-colons in a directly analogous way to English.
I'm the opposite. I use hyphens/dashes all the time, and almost never a semicolon. My English professor complained about my overuse.
The problem isn’t the em dashes, it’s the overuse of em dashes. Same for all the other ChatGPT-isms - they’re fine when used occasionally for effect, but there’s no variety. It’s always the same punctuation, same grammatical structures, same rhetorical moves, same paragraph lengths... That’s not what writing is supposed to be like and it becomes very grating after a while.
I mean, you just used a spurious one in your post. A period would have been fine.
I love em dashes — they are just so pretty. But the en dash also needs more love. 1 out of every, say, 7–15 of the hyphens I see should be en dashes instead.
What about the poor negative sign? Nothing is more grating to my eye than using the hyphen in a plot.
Argggh! Seeing “tell—tale sign” when it should be “tell-tale sign” is even worse! The point isn't to use punctuation, it's to use punctuation properly!
Have you ever noticed some people can't even use basic punctuation like question marks.
That's an intentional overcorrection for humor
Here's another one: "I can't be bothered to use em-dash?"
"In protest, I wrote [1] a plugin to convert all hyphens in this blog to em—dashes. Even ones that really should just be hyphens."
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Related and perhaps interesting: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/114730157688607856
I totally agree!
When I was growing up, I saw plays also use it like this:
You just don't see em-dashes used like they used to -- and it shows!They used two hyphens -- instead because typewriters don't have em dashes —.
This use in dialogue is common in Continental European languages, especially Romance languages. I think it's also common in English among writers who were influenced by other European languages?
Which languages are you talking about? It looks unfamiliar to me.
I think Romanian uses that too and it just occurred to me that "linie de dialog" is not dash, but em dash.
Here's someone talking about an example in French: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-em-dash-usage.364...
I believe I've also seen it in Spanish and Portuguese.
Brazilian here. That is indeed the standard way dialogue is represented in literature. We call the em-dash a "travessão".
IIRC Joyce was a fan.
Okay you had me at line—breaks. Rage. Then I saw it was civil disobedience, and I relaxed. Enjoy the em-dash lifestyle; it chose you apparently.
I’ve found myself using the EM dash way more since ChatGPT. I actually really like it as a tool in sentences.
Now everyone asks me what AI I’m using
Is it worth it?
If you are surrounded by a class of people that makes you genuinely second-guess the optics of your (appropriate) em-dash usage, I think that tells you a lot about what you need to change in your life. Likely you'll be happier in the company of people who know how to pick up a professionally written book or article.
I keep being surprised this is such a big deal on HN, and I have begun to wonder whether this is just a uniquely American conversation.
I grew up among European and other international English speakers and writers, and no one blinks an eye at a semicolon or an em-dash. I'm not saying they use them frequently or overuse them, they simply know how to use them correctly and use them well. Writing without either is like ... cooking without garlic. You can, but it certainly makes affairs a lot more boring.
Now I understand that America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this all comes from, do you think?
> America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify
I think so. Strunk & White is distinctly American. You see simplicity encouraged by others, including Virgina Tufte (_Syntax as Style_), and her well-known son Edward Tufte.
When I was learning to write, em dashes were not even touched on. The idea that exotic punctuation could be required to express cogent thoughts in academia would get laughed out of the room.
> teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this comes from?
No. It comes from the fact that Americans are functionally illiterate and genuinely have no idea how to use or interpret em dashes or semicolons. They don't use them and don't expect anyone else to use them. The only time Americans see these punctuations are in the handful of classic books they're required to skim to pass high school English class.
Why are Europeans so high on their own farts?
In 2023 only 44% of American adults read at a high school level.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp#...
The drop from 2017 to 2023 is worrying, but my first reaction is to ask if that is only in the US or is it global? I couldn't find 2023 data for other countries, but the 2012-2017 PIAAC literacy data puts USA roughly in line with the rest of the world. I know people dunking on American literacy isn't new, it goes back easily to 2012 or earlier. If the US is illiterate, then so is much of the world.
screenshot for convenience: https://i.imgur.com/IMrCZch.png
data explorer: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac/report.aspx
I've seen far more people complaining about people believing em dashes indicate AI, than people who actually believe that em dashes automatically indicate AI with no other evidence.
I'm on vacation so don't have my copy of Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style at hand, but I'm not sure he would subscribe to this manifesto.
Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)
A weak judgment betrays itself in the indiscriminate use of fine punctuation; for when the em-dash is made universal, it ceases to be distinguished, and becomes merely another form of hyphen.
Let the em-dash remain upon the height of style. Let the hyphen toil in the shade of the valley. And let the en-dash—patient, capable, and unjustly overlooked—at last be admitted to polite society, where it may properly mediate matters of form–function.
I have been using the em dash in writing forever - in Word, for example, you type a word, then space-hyphen-space, then you type another word and the hyphen is autocorrected to an em dash.
I don’t regularly use en-dashes, cause I don’t know how to make them.
I’m pretty sure Word’s autocorrect for space dash space is endash not emdash, no?
it’s usually space dash dash space across most word processors.
I picked up the habit a couple years ago of just undoing the autocorrect to an em dash and leaving it as two dashes to avoid accusations -- now it’s stuck with me
Word’s autocorrect inserts en-dashes.
"WHEREAS, the Large Language Model has merely mimicked a sophistication it cannot truly possess": says who(m)?
Says the LLM itself.
(Yes, of course the proclamation was written by Gemini. I gave it some guidance - that's it).
I've noticed people using emdashes more in known non-AI text in what I assume is a smokescreen to maintain plausible deniability when they wholesale copy AI text.
It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.
Or maybe they’ve been there all along and you just notice them more now because you’re looking for them.
I’m in. Where do I sign?
You sign like this:
— drob518
I actually do sign my emails with an em-dash like that.
Most AI generated text doesn't seem to have spaces around the em dashes. I've been using that as a subtle distinguishing marker; as both forms are considered grammatically correct.
tldr: use spaces around em dashes
Huh, I've observed the opposite, AI-generated text uses spaces most of the time. Might depend on language? Style guides I use (like Chicago) don't put spaces between em dashes so those always stand out immediately to me.
The whole point is not to change one's writing style simply because it has been associated with LLMs. Don't feed the paranoia!
i think the genie is out of the box; but i stand with your sentiment!
The typography I learned insists on no spaces
These things are inescapable. In Nov 2019, I helped a friend move. I had a cold and not wanting to get her sick, I wore one of the N95 masks that I had so that I could bicycle in fire season.
By 2022, doing the same would be a political statement.
It's easy to use on Linux with Compose key:
Compose + --- produces —
See all other combos in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
But who is using it without it in common scenarios?
In principle, an em dash is supposed to be used where most people use hyphens. That's why Word/LaTeX make it easy to use:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
Yeah, for sure, but without easy way to access it from the keyboard, most don't bother wasting time inserting it.
Smart tools like LibreOffice and above indeed help with it, but in other scenarios, especially common browser usage that's not the case. Compose key is really useful for that, but it's not widely known outside of Linux.
On macOS and Windows there are keyboard shortcuts for en/em dashes, but I also prefer the Compose key.
MacOS makes it simple: option + - for en-dash, option + shift + - for em-dash.
I see. What other combos does it support?
There are lots: https://mackeeper.com/blog/special-characters-mac-keyboard/#...
Yeah, looks like they developed separately from Compose combos.
I use µ for microns or micrometers µm. Option + m.
Also if you need ad-hoc bullets, just reach for option + 8.
• Like this.
The difficulty in accessing symbols like these is one of my (I'm sure correctable) hang-ups when using Linux — Arch, btw.
Option is used extensively for non-Ascii characters, a comprehensive list would be quite long.
A few of the easier to remember:
option + 0 for degrees º
option + u for to place an umlaut over the next typed character (when it's a valid combination, anyway) ëüä
option + c for cedilla ç
Interesting. Kind of reinventing Compose key combos. I wonder why they didn't just reuse Compose ones from FreeBSD.
This dates back to the beginning of the Mac, so it's almost 10 years older than FreeBSD. (I'm unfamiliar with other UNIX compose key tooling that may have predated it.)
I used em-dashes regularly. However, since they’ve become associated with LLM-generated text, I’ve stopped using them to avoid the appearance of AI assistance.
Sounds like a race to the bottom to me. If you know how to write well, keep at it.
Can I have the a reverse filter, that replaces smart quotes, em-dashes and other web filth with something a proper compiler rightfully expects? Nothing like copying code samples from someone's blog, and getting weird errors because the helpful blog software made the typography “prettier“
LLMs completely ruined "—" for me, its not jus that it makes text look generated I think it revealed something deep about the use of it that was always really cringe and just has no reason to exist...
> I think it revealed something deep about the use of it that was always really cringe
A punctuation mark was “cringe”? Seriously? Is this middle school?
I used to use em-dashes online to seem smart but now that internet addicts are defending them in order to be contrarian about AI slop, I'm abandoning them altogether. I have to finally admit that I actually think they're stupid and I don't want tiny differences in the length of a featureless horizontal line to be grammatically significant.
Especially when there's never any context where you can create a minimal pair between two utterances that would give them a different meaning depending on which dash was used. An em-dash is just a stuck up en-dash. I even hate the terms "em-dash" and "en-dash" now, after the typographical snobbery that flooded the culture for about a decade after web fonts got invented and standardized. Frontend developers and web designers started getting big salaries and buying fancy wines and whiskies, so I had to hear the word "Helvetica" 50x a day.
in other news, hurrah for the oxford comma