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 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 completely agree, this is perhaps the least sensible part of common English syntax.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello", he said.
Only one of these makes actual sense as a hierarchical grammar, and it's not the commonly accepted one! If enough of us do it correctly perhaps we can change it.
I’ve always wondered about this. I guess typographically they should just occupy the same horizontal space, or at least be kerned closer in such a way as to prevent the ugly holes without cramming.
It’s true, though, that the hierarchically wrong option looks better, IMHO. The whitespace before the comma is intolerable.
This is an interesting case where I am of two autistic hearts, the logical one slowly losing vehemence as I get older and become more accepting of traditions.
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.
I learned of it only by learning by Emacs! There are movement keys to move the to the next/previous sentence, and I wasn't understanding why they never worked for me.
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.
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 see them prevalent in fiction just as well. Looking at the first few pages of a few random works of fiction, continuing from my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400974
> some of them spaced and extra long; apparently this publisher had a very “inflationary” style!
It's pretty common to see a single em-dash for the comma-like parenthetical usage (p6 etc.) and a double em-dash for the "someone's dialogue was interrupted and cut off" usage (p15).
The "I'm redacting this name" usage (p11) often uses two em-dashes too, although Wodehouse('s typesetter) doesn't in this case.
You have successfully proved me wrong. I have read some of those books, and merely not noticed the prevelance of dashes! Perhaps that is proof they used them well?
I'm 63 and tend to communicate in full sentences, that often include semi-colons and differentiate between - and -- based on context.
I asked Perplexity in a months long development task that is both complex and complicated what punctuation I should utilize to minimize token and computational cost to get best results, and using semi-colons to delineate related requests in a single prompt was best. Separate prompts for different aspects of the specific projects, or double spaces between sentences. Placing commas inside or outside quotes wasn't mentioned. But third most important, according to Perplexity, was capitalizing important words even if they weren't proper nounds, which I did not expect but now fear I will over-use (I still write thank-you letters by hand, so YMMV!)
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.
Can you name some books as example? I picked a few random books from the period you mentioned, both fiction and non-fiction, and checked the first few pages of each; most of them had a good number of em dashes (or spaced en dashes, depending on the publisher's typographic style). For example:
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.
Maybe, but the problem with both em dash and en dash is that they are impossible to type on a typical keyboard layout. The hyphen, however, is not. Thus I'm going to keep using the hyphen because it's what I have a key for.
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!
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when Invention fails;
To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.
Your poem finish'd, next your Care
Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
Set off with num'rous Breaks⸺and 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?
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.
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.
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.
But if I understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395467 correctly, this em-dash broadside was itself AI-generated, so any similarity to the above might be completely unintended by the human who wrote the prompt. (Anyway, the similarity is superficial or spiritual at best.)
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.
That's depressing. For some reason this sub thread seems to think I'm talking about the US from the outside like a punching bag. I singled out the States because I'm more familiar with my country's stats.
0150 the endash, 0133 the ellipsis, 0145 the single quote opening, 0146 the apostrophe/single quote closing, 0147 and 0148 for double quotes, 0149 for a bullet point.
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. ;-)
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 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.
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“
Well the em dash remains difficult to type on a normal keyboard, this is a major reason why I don't use it, and why I think it will never get widespread adoption
Something about people successful with computers makes them quick to claim something is easy based on the number of steps needed, without regard to the ease of remembering all the arbitrary or sometimes contra-pattern steps required.
In my defense, I remember it because I expect Option key to modify the original character and Shift key to make it bigger, so remembering that Option plus Shift makes hyphen into a bigger alternate version of it, i.e. the em dash, is not difficult. I acknowledge that not everyone would see it this way.
Says anyone who has seen them at work. They very obviously do not possess intelligence with how often they fall over at basic tests that would never trip up a human. For example, the "how many r's are in the word 'strawberry'" test. No person who is literate in English would fail this, but LLMs do (or did, until the companies making them put in a kludge because they were embarrassed by how it revealed the stupidity of their models).
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.
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.
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'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.
I was always looking for them because I was the weird nerd pointing out proper em dash, en dash, and hyphen usage years and years ago.
It's really only devs / engineers I see doing this, probably in some quest to create an indistinguishable voice in the name of productivity or something.
Restored.
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!
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 so-called ugly punctuation sequences is irrelevant in the face of the immense opportunity for misbehavior this piffling preference provides perfidious publications.”, says I.
It’s true, though, that the hierarchically wrong option looks better, IMHO. The whitespace before the comma is intolerable.
This is an interesting case where I am of two autistic hearts, the logical one slowly losing vehemence as I get older and become more accepting of traditions.
I only discovered two spaces after a full stop/period was a thing after moving to the U.S., and only apparently in people over 40.
Also, Pluto is still a planet because the new planet definition is absolutely stupid, and it wasn't really their word to work with anyway.
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.
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.
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.
They are more prevalent in nonfiction.
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925: 28 on the first 10 pages https://archive.org/details/greatgatsby0000fitz_i1g1/page/n9...
- Love among the chickens, P. G. Wodehouse, 1909: 15 on the first 16 pages (and some of them spaced and extra long; apparently this publisher had a very “inflationary” style!) https://archive.org/details/loveamongchicken00wodeuoft/page/...
- Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham, 1915: eight on the first ten pages https://archive.org/details/ofhumanbondage0000wsom_j3w4/page...
- Howards End, E.M. Forster, 1910: at least 49 in the first ten pages https://archive.org/details/howardsend0000fors_q9r3/page/n9/...
It's pretty common to see a single em-dash for the comma-like parenthetical usage (p6 etc.) and a double em-dash for the "someone's dialogue was interrupted and cut off" usage (p15).
The "I'm redacting this name" usage (p11) often uses two em-dashes too, although Wodehouse('s typesetter) doesn't in this case.
I asked Perplexity in a months long development task that is both complex and complicated what punctuation I should utilize to minimize token and computational cost to get best results, and using semi-colons to delineate related requests in a single prompt was best. Separate prompts for different aspects of the specific projects, or double spaces between sentences. Placing commas inside or outside quotes wasn't mentioned. But third most important, according to Perplexity, was capitalizing important words even if they weren't proper nounds, which I did not expect but now fear I will over-use (I still write thank-you letters by hand, so YMMV!)
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.
- Leave It to Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse, 1923: five on the first two pages https://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BSS-318/page/10/mode/2up
- Kim, Rudyard Kipling, 1901 (1913): fourteen on the first three pages https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.1530/page/1/mode/2up
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, 1926 (1954 printing?): ok, I admit Hemingway was very spare with punctuation; I noticed none https://archive.org/details/bwb_C0-BHF-057/page/2/mode/2up
- Men of Mathematics vol 2, E. T. Bell, 1937 (1953 printing): two in the three pages of the Preface https://archive.org/details/MenOfMathematics/page/n5/mode/2u...
- The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant, 1926 (1962 printing?): seven in the first five pages https://archive.org/details/THESTORYOFPHILOSOPHY1TheLivesAnd...
- The American Language, H. L. Mencken, 1919: ten in the four pages of the preface https://archive.org/details/americanlanguage00mencuoft/page/...
(The counts are just the ones I noticed; there may be more.)
Are the books you read very different, or do you have a different threshold for "rare"/"niche"?
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!I believe I've also seen it in Spanish and Portuguese.
Related and perhaps interesting: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/114730157688607856
By 2022, doing the same would be a political statement.
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.
Now everyone asks me what AI I’m using
https://books.google.com/books?id=c6MIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA86
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20844
But if I understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395467 correctly, this em-dash broadside was itself AI-generated, so any similarity to the above might be completely unintended by the human who wrote the prompt. (Anyway, the similarity is superficial or spiritual at best.)
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?
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.
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.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp#...
screenshot for convenience: https://i.imgur.com/IMrCZch.png
data explorer: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac/report.aspx
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/295674/origin-of...
Now I use Vim digraphs. ^K-M.
Some other useful ones to memorise:
0150 the endash, 0133 the ellipsis, 0145 the single quote opening, 0146 the apostrophe/single quote closing, 0147 and 0148 for double quotes, 0149 for a bullet point.
Option-Shift-Hyphen for em-dash
Option-Hyphen for en-dash
Shift-Hyphen for underscore
Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)
I don’t regularly use en-dashes, cause I don’t know how to make them.
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
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?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
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.
A keyboard with every possible character would have its own simplicity challenges.
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
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.
Choose your poison at https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Pd
(One might feel that normal keyboards don't have a compose key.)
On the other hand, normal keyboard have an insert key which serves no purpose and can thus be remapped to compose.
Not on Mac:
hyphen/dash: -
En-dash: ⌥-
Em-dash: ⇧⌥-
(Yes, of course the proclamation was written by Gemini. I gave it some guidance - that's it).
tldr: use spaces around em dashes
— drob518
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.
A punctuation mark was “cringe”? Seriously? Is this middle school?
It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.
It's really only devs / engineers I see doing this, probably in some quest to create an indistinguishable voice in the name of productivity or something.