I just use hyphens all the time and always have. I don’t like that AI loves em dashes so much that it looks like everything I write now is AI generated, but if you were to deep dive you’d notice I’m using hyphens - never em dashes - so my writing can’t be AI. Granted you’d have to be pretty pedantic to care in the first place but it’s 2026 and here we are.
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.
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.
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.
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
The thinking is that using a hyphen here, as in “the pre-Websterburg Bakery era,” risks the suggestion that pre attaches only to Websterburg. It’s unlikely, though, that a reader would truly be confused.
n.b. I don't know how to code an endash here. Would love to learn!
"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry."
I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.
Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large).
Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power.
The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.
Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old?
Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents.
So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.
Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!
Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.
You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references.
This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_.
It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US:
> Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name.
Three-em dashes are multinational conglomerate punctuation.
They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape.
In German, nouns have gender, so why not more inclusive punctuation? The him dash, her dash, it dash, and the nonbinary them dash.
It's too bad Hacker News filters out the really good ones, like the um dash: — (U+2014 EM DASH + U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS) and the over-accentuated üm-á-ñå-ḍ-ç dash: — (EM DASH + DIAERESIS + ACUTE + TILDE + RING ABOVE + DOT BELOW + CEDILLA).
@dang I know @mentions don't work so you'll never read this, so screw you for filtering out my favorite punctuation accentuations, you jerk! It feels like my creativity is being oppressed!
One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted:
- − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative
- I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary
- × (multiplication symbol) for use in dimensions and when actually indicating multiplication
- ′ and ″ (single and double primes) for use when indicating feet and inches, or minutes and seconds
- it also made explicit the difference between º (ordinal o) and ° (degree symbol) and noted when to make use of the other ordinals
- … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces
- the various spaces en and em space, non-breaking flex space, &c.
I _think_ I still have a photocopy somewhere, but really should find a copy of the actual magazine....
The far more egregious and reprehensible thing is that many books now are published using quite pedestrian typing of the near equivalents from the keyboard as opposed to actually typing the correct signs.
The big reason for manually constructing an ellipsis is to ensure consistent spacing for the 3 and 4 dot forms --- some typefaces will include both, but may not fit well if the type specs have the text set tight or loose.
My apologies, should I have typed \thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.?
Test:
'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'
I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?
"There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and, guess what, parentheses are right there for you."
> There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence and realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and guess what? Parentheses are right there for you.
That's what I'd do. Note the conversion of the first comma to "and," as well.
Your first sentence is a perfect example of why emdashes need to exist. The comma is overloaded, since it can be used both as a list separator and for parenthetical asides. But that first sentence starts using them as a list separator, and then inserts a parenthetical aside into the list. Emdash wins this test.
I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer.
I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks like crap with parenthesis, as if the author should have thought of a way to avoid doing that, while with the m-dash there’s no problem at all.
I just thought of the most annoying blog in the world. Individual spacing between words, depending on how thoughtful you want the pause to be. And by "individual" I mean a different floating point number denoted amount of em each. em > em-dashes. Or put differently, em dashes em-dashes.
It's a bit like 2 space indention versus 4 or 8 space. I find the em-dash example pretty compelling because visually relaxes my eye more than commas do — similar to how prefer at least 4 space indention over 2.
(Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)
Ah, so my constant interrupting myself is a sign of intelligence? That's great news.
But seriously, trying to express the spider web of thoughts in my head as a linear string of words is really difficult for me and that doesn't make me feel very smart.
Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash.
I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based).
(ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)
Wrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).
That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetting unions all bargained for sinecures rather than active participation in the Desktop Publishing Revolution.
>Because it looks better and is a guide to communication.
Personally, I think em-dashes (when in a font that shows the damn difference) look exaggerated and silly. They certainly don't provide any important guidance to its meaning that I can't derive from context.
Nothing wrong with CMOS/APA/MLA dashes, I quite like them but usage in LLM prose has ruined it for me. AP dashes are weird, too much horizontal spacing, looks horrible and can really erode typographic color sometimes. "International" Oxford/Cambridge spaced dashes is nicest.
The funny thing is at both extremes, either none or indiscriminate use of dashes like in TFA, is a canary of "human writing".
People (including comments here) often attribute LLM use to prevalence in training data but it is probably far less common in the wild than we are led to believe, the more likely scenario is that whatever text-to-text normalization tools used ended up inserting whatever their idiosyncratic typographic styles were.
Since before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dataset of middlebrow American news blogs and similar sources. So I'm not surprised that the em dash has stuck out to people as such a prominent feature of its style. It definitely has its uses but I can't say I would mind at all if the controversy diminished its use in real writing.
Same. It is really annoying to write something and have someone say, “just so you know, em dashes makes it obvious it was written by AI.” You know how else uses em dashes? People who know how to write.
So... fuck 'em? Hit 'em with a: "You're absolutely right — em dashes are a common signifier of AI" and go about your business. Anyone creating on the internet[1] is running laps around the class of losers who run from post to post dropping useless comments.
[1]: I'd even go so far as to extend that "anyone" to: "anyone creating, even with AI assistance!"
> It is really annoying to write something and have someone say (...)
It's worse than that. What they are saying is the equivalent to saying that knowing how to do something properly, and having the attention to detail to do so, makes it obvious it was written by AI. It sounds like a prelude to human incompetence, to ensuring that AI products are better than human ones.
About the only semi-convincing argument that I've heard is that AI over uses these tells. But let's face reality here: a lot of people griping about AI generated or AI assisted writing are not looking at over use. Plus a lot of people tend to over use the said tells while they learn how to use them properly.
I'm all for Unicode if you want to say something like 你好 but separate nearly similar characters, like the different kinds of dashes, feel somehow wasteful. I prefer to stick with things that align with ASCII.
Typesetting aside, the em-dash as a grammatical construct is indeed pretty great.
I did not know option + shift + hyphen produced an em dash. I've always used a double hyphen as a stand in -- as I did just now. LLMs don't do it and I haven't been accused yet. Though, more likely, I'm not popular enough for people to notice!
The overemphasis by critics on punctuation and "this not that" is tiring. I don't really know how to describe LLM writing but it has the same qualities as flat soda. Some authors you feel as though you fall through their work with little effort; unable to stop until gravity slams you into their conclusion. LLM writing can feel like an uphill hike to a sewage treatment plant. That is, its easy to convince yourself to stop at any time. There's a positive quality to that. I hope AI labs don't find a way to remove it.
> ...on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.
Fedora with XFCE here, but last I checked on Windows, it worked exactly the same over there: With a Chinese IME installed, tap shift to switch input language, shift+hyphen produces a double em-dash: ——, likewise, shift+6 a double elipsis: ……
You encounter those a lot in simple, machine translated Chinese, along with literal translations of "not X but Y", "not just ... but also" and similar sentence constructs that are common in Chinese. I suspect that's how a disproportionate amount of that ended up in training material in the first place.
This post is so self-consciously dependent on inserting em dashes everywhere that it kinda supports its own counterargument. If you're going to make a case for em dashes enabling more fluid writing and more distinctive voice, then you ought to actually use them that way.
I didn't know that AP style recommended spaces either side of the em dash. Here in the UK we generally use en dashes instead, and I thought em dashes always had no spaces. Apparently the wire machines that AP sent their news out by in olden times couldn't always do en dashes.
LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.
i typically enjoy a good profanity-laden rant, but something about this particular one feels very forced. this sentence, for example: "[...] What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.". i cant really put my finger on why, but it almost feels like the author wrote their rant, then came back afterwards with a quota of fuck/shit/bitch they wanted to meet, placing them wherever they could.
in any case, i mostly agree with the author that ai has co-opted too many things to be concerned about it anymore. i remember being linked a list of "1,000 words not to use" because ai used them a lot (e.g. "delve", "absolutely", etc.) and the venn diagram with the 1,000 most common english words was practically a circle. you would be unintelligible if you rigorously avoided them all. now i just write without care of my ai-similarity score.
> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think?
If I'm writing something, typically I want to share my thoughts with other people and get their feedback. It won't work if they dismiss my writing because of some superficial stylistic choice, without even trying to engage with the ideas that I'm trying to express.
I also love them - makes spotting AI written content easier. People debated implementing complex algorithms how to watermark AI content - but luckily AI just settled on it by itself.
I feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters.
When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing?
It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself.
In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on
I too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it.
We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving over time (especially over the past two decades) I think I'd prefer to shift my habits in line with whatever the "modern standard" is in order to avoid falling into pitfalls, i.e. being accused of being an AI writer.
Good point, but I think it's a little more complex than that.
To my knowledge (and what I meant by "old school"), it was common to type a "--" dash on typewriters[0] because most of them lacked en- and em-dashes, which are obviously not digital documentation devices.
But yes, typesetters of old (old, old school!) had myriad glyph blocks available to them for pressing!
The double-hyphen is by no means "old school": it's a kludge for twentieth-century systems like typewriters and word processors that did not have em dashes or an easy way to insert them. The very names "em dash" and "en dash" should illustrate their age: they go back to the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.
The idea that a double-hyphen is "old school" is on par with the false notion that double-spacing between sentences is a product of the typewriter; one need only look at a typeset book from before the twentieth century to see the truth, or look at a decent image of the Declaration of Independence or other hand-written document from prior centuries to see the extra space left between sentences.
Many of the changes we see in written English style are the product of ignorance of the past beyond two generations or so. Avoiding em-dashes to keep up with the latest anti-AI fad is just reacting mindlessly to the stimulus of popular ignorance instead of deliberately situating one's style in the history of writing conventions.
As per sibling comment, I think my "old school" wording is getting misconstrued here. I did mean 20th-century "old school", i.e. typewriters... Is the Late Middle Ages considered "old school"? :)
Agreed that in terms of precedent, typesetters had moveable type dashes for their presses.
> the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.
> people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content.
This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling.
The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when best-intentioned, all this does is make poor writing a bit more palatable by giving it a veneer of polish.
> This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance.
No, with AI it's because it's MUCH faster than evaluating substance, and fast ways to weed out AI slop are desparately needed, since it can be produced so quickly.
As of recently, there is a strong correlation between use of em-dashes and a verbose, bloated style of writing that uses many words to not quite get to multiple repeated points. Not well written, in other words.
The combination of both I usually find in text generated for me by LLM, and so far, it serves as a good signal for density of information and, inversely, not-quite-right ideas and their connections. (That's not to say it's pervasive, but below the surface, the quality of LLM text as a medium is often not great.)
There may be well-written text of non-trivial length generated by LLMs, but so far I haven't knowingly encountered any, with or without em-dashes. Human editing remains very necessary.
The problem is that the substancelessness of AI writing nowadays tends to be subtle and well-hidden (but huge). Focusing on superficial "tells" is basically an attempt of a quick, cheap defense against the imbalance of human effort, where someone can spend a few dollars and a few minutes and e.g. generate dozens of PRs that would take many hours of real human effort to process and fix the deeper shortcomings of.
The em-dash-as-AI trope is nothing new. (Apart from the fact that MS Word etc convert them automatically.)
If I post some information, then I have had people accusing me of cribbing it off Wikipedia. When I have translated from some languages, people assume I'm using Google. Even though in one case, the language in question wasn't even available on Google Translate. (I went and checked.)
I've used dashes in typeset works ever since I learnt how to do them in (La)TeX (---). You don't usually put spaces around them, though.
There are actually four different "dash" type things in TeX: a hyphen, an en dash (for ranges like "10--20 pages"), em dash (---), and the minus symbol ($-$).
Isn't english known for not having an official set of gramatical rules? There are conventions and rules from universities i.e Cambridge vs Oxford comma. But there is no single body that is commonly accepted by all english-speaking countries to be codifying the official rules of the language.
I am personally a fan of space padded em-dash. Visually, semantically, it makes sense on all modern planes. There's an argument for line-break parsing.
Of course I recommend do-not-adopt, think Roman-cart-wheel-axle-width reasons.
I just use hyphens all the time and always have. I don’t like that AI loves em dashes so much that it looks like everything I write now is AI generated, but if you were to deep dive you’d notice I’m using hyphens - never em dashes - so my writing can’t be AI. Granted you’d have to be pretty pedantic to care in the first place but it’s 2026 and here we are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 thinking is that using a hyphen here, as in “the pre-Websterburg Bakery era,” risks the suggestion that pre attaches only to Websterburg. It’s unlikely, though, that a reader would truly be confused.n.b. I don't know how to code an endash here. Would love to learn!
Which one is the minus symbol?
U+2212: −
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2212
None, it is a separate character/code point and is notable for aligning with the + and having the same width.
which one of those is a hyphen?
You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B).
Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.
"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry."
https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes
I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.
> I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it?
Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.
That is so stupid.
Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large).
Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power.
The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.
Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old?
Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents.
So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.
Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!
Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.
You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references.
This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_.
It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US:
> Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name.
[0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52
I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.
If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash.
I’m curious, what is the objection to Han unification?
Three-em dashes are multinational conglomerate punctuation.
They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape.
In German, nouns have gender, so why not more inclusive punctuation? The him dash, her dash, it dash, and the nonbinary them dash.
It's too bad Hacker News filters out the really good ones, like the um dash: — (U+2014 EM DASH + U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS) and the over-accentuated üm-á-ñå-ḍ-ç dash: — (EM DASH + DIAERESIS + ACUTE + TILDE + RING ABOVE + DOT BELOW + CEDILLA).
@dang I know @mentions don't work so you'll never read this, so screw you for filtering out my favorite punctuation accentuations, you jerk! It feels like my creativity is being oppressed!
One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted:
- − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative
- I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary
- × (multiplication symbol) for use in dimensions and when actually indicating multiplication
- ′ and ″ (single and double primes) for use when indicating feet and inches, or minutes and seconds
- it also made explicit the difference between º (ordinal o) and ° (degree symbol) and noted when to make use of the other ordinals
- … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces
- © ® ™ ℠ ℗ (copyright and so forth) to indicate such legal constructs as appropriate
- the various spaces en and em space, non-breaking flex space, &c.
I _think_ I still have a photocopy somewhere, but really should find a copy of the actual magazine....
The far more egregious and reprehensible thing is that many books now are published using quite pedestrian typing of the near equivalents from the keyboard as opposed to actually typing the correct signs.
I wrote a bit on this at:
https://tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf
(note that it intended to be printed, folded, cut in the center, then re-folded so as to make a "hot dog" booklet: https://www.makingbooks.com/hotdog.shtml )
EDIT: That said, folks should be sure to get:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41600.The_Mac_is_Not_a_T...
or
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358248.The_PC_is_Not_a_T...
If you’re on a Mac or iOS, it’s extremely easy to use the global text substitution to replace three periods (..., v...) with ellipsis (…, ⋮), and other symbols ((c), (r ), ^o, etc.) with their Unicode equivalent (©, ®, °, etc.).
Once upon a time there was COMPOSE.exe on Windows, then allchars, and now we've come full-circle to wincompose:
https://wincompose.info/
> … while available as a special character, it is often better to construct this using suitably sized non-breaking spaces
I'm curious why? Kerning? Regardless, it sounds like a lot of work
> but really should find a copy of the actual magazine....
Uh, "..." ;)
The big reason for manually constructing an ellipsis is to ensure consistent spacing for the 3 and 4 dot forms --- some typefaces will include both, but may not fit well if the type specs have the text set tight or loose.
My apologies, should I have typed \thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.?
Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'
I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?
I would always prefer to do:
"There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and, guess what, parentheses are right there for you."
> There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence and realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and guess what? Parentheses are right there for you.
That's what I'd do. Note the conversion of the first comma to "and," as well.
The parentheses bind tightly to "an addendum" and change the meaning
Your first sentence is a perfect example of why emdashes need to exist. The comma is overloaded, since it can be used both as a list separator and for parenthetical asides. But that first sentence starts using them as a list separator, and then inserts a parenthetical aside into the list. Emdash wins this test.
I think parenthesis are ideal for a parenthetical aside.
I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer.
I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks like crap with parenthesis, as if the author should have thought of a way to avoid doing that, while with the m-dash there’s no problem at all.
I just thought of the most annoying blog in the world. Individual spacing between words, depending on how thoughtful you want the pause to be. And by "individual" I mean a different floating point number denoted amount of em each. em > em-dashes. Or put differently, em dashes em-dashes.
It's a bit like 2 space indention versus 4 or 8 space. I find the em-dash example pretty compelling because visually relaxes my eye more than commas do — similar to how prefer at least 4 space indention over 2.
(Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)
I think offsetting the em dash with spaces is contrary to almost every style guide.
Chicago does it one way and AP does it the other.
I definitely prefer it un-spaced, though, personally.
Yeah. They also use em dashes to repeat a word with emphasis, something that is done much better with parentheses and italics.
> And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause.
> And also occasionally (occasionally) one just needs a random dramatic pause.
I know which one I'd rather read. Though, frankly, I'd prefer neither and I'm trying to remove this kind of thing from my own writing.
I can't be the only one that reads those two examples very differently.
In a first example, the second "occasionally" is stressed, when in second example it feels almost whispered.
Em dashes—if properly used—are really useful.
They help convey that I am so smart—and I think so fast—that I have to constantly interrupt myself.
But—and I think this is important—it’s really easy to overuse them.
Ah, so my constant interrupting myself is a sign of intelligence? That's great news.
But seriously, trying to express the spider web of thoughts in my head as a linear string of words is really difficult for me and that doesn't make me feel very smart.
Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash.
I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based).
(ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)
Wie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?
Wrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).
Because it looks better and is a guide to communication.
For the poster child of a naïvely set/composed text which suffers thereby see:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/vir...
That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetting unions all bargained for sinecures rather than active participation in the Desktop Publishing Revolution.
>Because it looks better and is a guide to communication.
Personally, I think em-dashes (when in a font that shows the damn difference) look exaggerated and silly. They certainly don't provide any important guidance to its meaning that I can't derive from context.
That was a cool toolbox BTW :)
Nothing wrong with CMOS/APA/MLA dashes, I quite like them but usage in LLM prose has ruined it for me. AP dashes are weird, too much horizontal spacing, looks horrible and can really erode typographic color sometimes. "International" Oxford/Cambridge spaced dashes is nicest.
The funny thing is at both extremes, either none or indiscriminate use of dashes like in TFA, is a canary of "human writing".
People (including comments here) often attribute LLM use to prevalence in training data but it is probably far less common in the wild than we are led to believe, the more likely scenario is that whatever text-to-text normalization tools used ended up inserting whatever their idiosyncratic typographic styles were.
Troglodyte here... I never use em dashes, never use semicolons, overuse ellipses and commas.
You have ellipses… on my iOS, “…” have become one triple-dot
Ellipses are garbage outside of dialog, and even there readers dislike seeing them frequently.
I agree they are inappropriate to use in formal writing. For stuff like blogs and chatting online though, they're fine.
As a reader, I dislike seeing em dashes almost everywhere.
Since before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dataset of middlebrow American news blogs and similar sources. So I'm not surprised that the em dash has stuck out to people as such a prominent feature of its style. It definitely has its uses but I can't say I would mind at all if the controversy diminished its use in real writing.
AI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.
Same. It is really annoying to write something and have someone say, “just so you know, em dashes makes it obvious it was written by AI.” You know how else uses em dashes? People who know how to write.
So... fuck 'em? Hit 'em with a: "You're absolutely right — em dashes are a common signifier of AI" and go about your business. Anyone creating on the internet[1] is running laps around the class of losers who run from post to post dropping useless comments.
[1]: I'd even go so far as to extend that "anyone" to: "anyone creating, even with AI assistance!"
> It is really annoying to write something and have someone say (...)
It's worse than that. What they are saying is the equivalent to saying that knowing how to do something properly, and having the attention to detail to do so, makes it obvious it was written by AI. It sounds like a prelude to human incompetence, to ensuring that AI products are better than human ones.
About the only semi-convincing argument that I've heard is that AI over uses these tells. But let's face reality here: a lot of people griping about AI generated or AI assisted writing are not looking at over use. Plus a lot of people tend to over use the said tells while they learn how to use them properly.
Same. Em dashes have been around a lot longer than AI. Let’s take ‘em (pardon the pun) back!
It sounds like people ruined them for you — it isn't AI calling you out for using them.
Don’t let the haters win.
I'm all for Unicode if you want to say something like 你好 but separate nearly similar characters, like the different kinds of dashes, feel somehow wasteful. I prefer to stick with things that align with ASCII.
Typesetting aside, the em-dash as a grammatical construct is indeed pretty great.
I did not know option + shift + hyphen produced an em dash. I've always used a double hyphen as a stand in -- as I did just now. LLMs don't do it and I haven't been accused yet. Though, more likely, I'm not popular enough for people to notice!
The overemphasis by critics on punctuation and "this not that" is tiring. I don't really know how to describe LLM writing but it has the same qualities as flat soda. Some authors you feel as though you fall through their work with little effort; unable to stop until gravity slams you into their conclusion. LLM writing can feel like an uphill hike to a sewage treatment plant. That is, its easy to convince yourself to stop at any time. There's a positive quality to that. I hope AI labs don't find a way to remove it.
One thing I've always loved about Apple's OSs is that they will render an em dash if you press-and-hold the hyphen key.
Great accessibility.
-----------------------------------------
huh?
Oh - you meant iOS. I don't see a need to differentiate dashes there either...
sorry, I meant iOS. on macOS you have to Option + Shift + Hyphen.
> ...on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.
Fedora with XFCE here, but last I checked on Windows, it worked exactly the same over there: With a Chinese IME installed, tap shift to switch input language, shift+hyphen produces a double em-dash: ——, likewise, shift+6 a double elipsis: ……
You encounter those a lot in simple, machine translated Chinese, along with literal translations of "not X but Y", "not just ... but also" and similar sentence constructs that are common in Chinese. I suspect that's how a disproportionate amount of that ended up in training material in the first place.
I was introduced to em and en dashes reading Knuth's book on typesetting (the original one, before the TeX book series). Perhaps LLMs were too...
I never see emdashes squeezed tightly to the word before them.
I only ever see them with an AP-style spacing before and after.
I really don't get liking em dashes. Just use two sentences or modify your original one. Both options are clearer like 90% of the time.
This is a great read — really — a truly great one — it really is.
This post is so self-consciously dependent on inserting em dashes everywhere that it kinda supports its own counterargument. If you're going to make a case for em dashes enabling more fluid writing and more distinctive voice, then you ought to actually use them that way.
I didn't know that AP style recommended spaces either side of the em dash. Here in the UK we generally use en dashes instead, and I thought em dashes always had no spaces. Apparently the wire machines that AP sent their news out by in olden times couldn't always do en dashes.
I get it. But I never would have until I built muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut.
writes an anodyne wall of text about his obsession with particular elements in a character table - ends with:
PS: if you want personalised advice from me on how to use punctuation correctly, you can now get it for $175/hour.
humans sometimes ...
ps: sasha, if you want me to read your future regurgitations you can now get that for €175/minute (limited availability, only skimread mode for now)
> Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes?
Some people even take pride on being able to detect (often falsely) AI generated work.
LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.
i typically enjoy a good profanity-laden rant, but something about this particular one feels very forced. this sentence, for example: "[...] What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.". i cant really put my finger on why, but it almost feels like the author wrote their rant, then came back afterwards with a quota of fuck/shit/bitch they wanted to meet, placing them wherever they could.
in any case, i mostly agree with the author that ai has co-opted too many things to be concerned about it anymore. i remember being linked a list of "1,000 words not to use" because ai used them a lot (e.g. "delve", "absolutely", etc.) and the venn diagram with the 1,000 most common english words was practically a circle. you would be unintelligible if you rigorously avoided them all. now i just write without care of my ai-similarity score.
>you would be unintelligible if you rigorously avoided them all
You could write naturally and then let an LLM translate avoiding the 1000 words, with verification harness or maybe a custom sampler.
It smacks of “Hitler also loved…(some innocuous thing).”
and here i thought "option -" was an em-dash, but no, it's an _en_-dash.
Why the hell did they bury this thing three key-presses down on any keyboard???
I do indeed mis-using dashes.
Four words: Comic Sans Em Dashes!
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think?
If I'm writing something, typically I want to share my thoughts with other people and get their feedback. It won't work if they dismiss my writing because of some superficial stylistic choice, without even trying to engage with the ideas that I'm trying to express.
I also love them - makes spotting AI written content easier. People debated implementing complex algorithms how to watermark AI content - but luckily AI just settled on it by itself.
(sorry for a bit of gaslighting)
em dashes are the best thing to track if the content is AI written, lol
iOS settings-> general->keyboard
Turn off smart punctuation.
Saves bytes.
I feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters.
When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing?
It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself.
In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on
I too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it.
We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving over time (especially over the past two decades) I think I'd prefer to shift my habits in line with whatever the "modern standard" is in order to avoid falling into pitfalls, i.e. being accused of being an AI writer.
> ("--", the old school way of writing it)
The old school of writing it in digital documents. Typesetting predates and is not limited to digital documents.
Good point, but I think it's a little more complex than that.
To my knowledge (and what I meant by "old school"), it was common to type a "--" dash on typewriters[0] because most of them lacked en- and em-dashes, which are obviously not digital documentation devices.
But yes, typesetters of old (old, old school!) had myriad glyph blocks available to them for pressing!
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Typewriter_conventi...
On a typewriter you can write symbols overlapping, so if you write '--' it becomes '–'.
Sure... But overstriking takes more time and effort, which is why "--" was the convention.
The double-hyphen is by no means "old school": it's a kludge for twentieth-century systems like typewriters and word processors that did not have em dashes or an easy way to insert them. The very names "em dash" and "en dash" should illustrate their age: they go back to the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.
The idea that a double-hyphen is "old school" is on par with the false notion that double-spacing between sentences is a product of the typewriter; one need only look at a typeset book from before the twentieth century to see the truth, or look at a decent image of the Declaration of Independence or other hand-written document from prior centuries to see the extra space left between sentences.
Many of the changes we see in written English style are the product of ignorance of the past beyond two generations or so. Avoiding em-dashes to keep up with the latest anti-AI fad is just reacting mindlessly to the stimulus of popular ignorance instead of deliberately situating one's style in the history of writing conventions.
As per sibling comment, I think my "old school" wording is getting misconstrued here. I did mean 20th-century "old school", i.e. typewriters... Is the Late Middle Ages considered "old school"? :)
Agreed that in terms of precedent, typesetters had moveable type dashes for their presses.
> the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.
This is very interesting!
> people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content.
This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling.
The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when best-intentioned, all this does is make poor writing a bit more palatable by giving it a veneer of polish.
> This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance.
No, with AI it's because it's MUCH faster than evaluating substance, and fast ways to weed out AI slop are desparately needed, since it can be produced so quickly.
As of recently, there is a strong correlation between use of em-dashes and a verbose, bloated style of writing that uses many words to not quite get to multiple repeated points. Not well written, in other words.
The combination of both I usually find in text generated for me by LLM, and so far, it serves as a good signal for density of information and, inversely, not-quite-right ideas and their connections. (That's not to say it's pervasive, but below the surface, the quality of LLM text as a medium is often not great.)
There may be well-written text of non-trivial length generated by LLMs, but so far I haven't knowingly encountered any, with or without em-dashes. Human editing remains very necessary.
The problem is that the substancelessness of AI writing nowadays tends to be subtle and well-hidden (but huge). Focusing on superficial "tells" is basically an attempt of a quick, cheap defense against the imbalance of human effort, where someone can spend a few dollars and a few minutes and e.g. generate dozens of PRs that would take many hours of real human effort to process and fix the deeper shortcomings of.
The em-dash-as-AI trope is nothing new. (Apart from the fact that MS Word etc convert them automatically.)
If I post some information, then I have had people accusing me of cribbing it off Wikipedia. When I have translated from some languages, people assume I'm using Google. Even though in one case, the language in question wasn't even available on Google Translate. (I went and checked.)
I've used dashes in typeset works ever since I learnt how to do them in (La)TeX (---). You don't usually put spaces around them, though.
There are actually four different "dash" type things in TeX: a hyphen, an en dash (for ranges like "10--20 pages"), em dash (---), and the minus symbol ($-$).
> “But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.
Hell yes, and ROFL. I’m tired of em dashes being cited as evidence of AI.
Spaced en dashes are far more common internationally. Em dashes are primarily a US American tradition.
It's interesting that an article extoling the virtues of the em-dash isn't using them correctly. They don't get spaces around them.
It's a stylistic choice. Here's an analysis, complete with a link back to an old HN discussion:
https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash
I beta read for a popular american author and they started using spaces too.
Isn't english known for not having an official set of gramatical rules? There are conventions and rules from universities i.e Cambridge vs Oxford comma. But there is no single body that is commonly accepted by all english-speaking countries to be codifying the official rules of the language.
I have seen this more and more and I don’t understand it.
I am personally a fan of space padded em-dash. Visually, semantically, it makes sense on all modern planes. There's an argument for line-break parsing.
Of course I recommend do-not-adopt, think Roman-cart-wheel-axle-width reasons.
That’s not entirely true. Some formats yes. In this case they’re using it correctly https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
I still use them unapologetically. I don't give a shit about your AI purity tests, thank you.
The economy may collapse and the job market rendered irreparable but the real victims of the AI boom are the em-dash and the sparkle emoji