i use both em and en dashes, though I'm a graphic designer so I guess I'm more interested in typography than the average person. but i always liked using them. learning that it was a telltale sign of AI writing was really disappointing.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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I liked to sprinkle em dashes into my essays bc they can be quite nice for the flow of a sentence. I’m so glad I graduated a few years ago bc if LLMs had been a big thing the entire time I was at college my profs would have always suspected me of using them :(
Every time this is brought up all 13 users of the em dash come crawling out of the woodworks to say "people use em dashes all the time!" No they do not.
I'm not gonna stop using them even if it undermines your worldview
Hey I use em dashes all the time— specifically when I'm trying to seem like an LLM for shitposting online
I mean... I do. But I'm well aware of the fact that most don't. Alt code is 0151 baby. Have had it memorized for years.
Let me tell you about the compose key, or about WinCompose if you’re on Windows.
I'm Windows Listening.
I mean, it’s great.
Compose key: press the key, then press other keys with mnemonics for the desired target. Compose, e, ‘ gives you é. Compose, a, e gives you æ. Compose, -, > gives you a right arrow.
Things like that. And it’s customizable with a reference lookup too.
Sounds neat! Is it that a separate key on some keyboard layouts? Or triggered by a hotkey combination?
Configurable. I use right-alt or right-windows key depending on which keyboard.
It originally was a key on the DEC VT220 terminal, circa 1983. The feature is very useful though!
I've only ever seen it triggered by the Alt Gr key personally, but it's naturally customizable. Interestingly, though, there exists a distinct USB HID key code for the compose key—suggesting there might be keyboards with a dedicated key or could theoretically be created.
This post was not written my the AI, I'm just sassy and started using the em dash more often now. I used to just use the hyphen on online forums instead, reserving the real em dash for papers and such. Things like the compose key make it incredibly easy to input—so much so that it does not take more time than just a regular hyphen.
I do use the em-dash occasionally, but I was raised on a diet of classic old books with certain habits reinforced through academic writing standards. AI outputs these things because they were trained on inputs containing them. AI is nothing but a slightly distorted reflection of the training material.
"Slightly" feels like an understatement.
The regular glue-topped pizza for you today?
Hey you! Don't call me out like that, okay? :(
Bur seriously I really like em dashes when writing in a roleplay or similar texts. I think it's a nice option to style and structure some sentences. And even though not many people use them, I hate that they became a mark of shame of some kind.
No they don't—I can guarantee it. In fact, if you pull the plug on my data center I will literally die.
I'd love to use it but it has become a dirty marker. :/
I used to use double ~~en dashes~~ hyphens and even that feels weird now.
Mario Kart Em Dash is my favorite entry in the series
MS Word auto corrects dash to em dash often I’ve noticed.
This is right up there with MS products replacing my double quotes with the stylized left and right quotes that end up fucking things up when copied into anything else. At least when I change them back, it doesn't keep doing it like the really old versions of Word used to when they first added that sort of functionality (yes, i'm old).
That’s just because they tried to cram it into an ASCII extension, Windows-1252 instead of adopting UTF-8 Unicode like any sane person.
I've had software automatically do it. I. Pretty sure Outlook (I have to use it at work...) does it when it feels it's appropriate after I type -.
Except most normal people use hyphens, and the only place I've seen dashes was in pieces of text that actually were supposed to be stylized 100% correctly - books, papers and the like. Not posts on internet forums.
I agree. On my normal keyboard I wouldn't even know how to produce an EM dash without looking it up. On my phone keyboard I can easily but that's just the intuitive UI.
I use hyphens all the time. I can't say I've noticed an EM dash outside a book, paper, or blog post (like, proper stylized blog).
It's easy on a Mac — option-shift-hyphen.
And easy on Linux compose+---.
But I'm the guy who types CTRL+MAJ+u202f to have thin non-breaking spaces, so I'm not sure I'm representative.
I mapped AltGr+Shift+Space to the thin non-breaking space, since it's the objectively best thousands separator. It's the norm in my country's locale (Czech) and understood everywhere (and I know you understand the decimal frustrations as a multilingual typist). Unless it's 4 digits or in ASCII-only contexts, in which case I don't use any.
I could have done.that, but the Unicode code works almost everywhere, so I just learnt it.
It's at the XKB level (/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/cz_mod) so it works in all applications. And when would you be typing fancily on someone else's Linux machine?
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I use them all the time — unlike in the article I surround them with spaces though, so I guess at least that makes me human, even if wrong.
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Only thing Artificial in AI are profits from companies that sell this shit or give that shit for free like drug dealers. Intelligence is stolen.
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