Why the em dash is attracting unfair suspicion

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-em-dash-artificial-intelligence-punctuation-authorship/

by throw0101a • 12 months ago

39 36 12 months ago

theglobeandmail.com

throw0101a• 12 months ago

https://archive.today/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/a...

https://archive.ph/xmefn

pjs_• 12 months ago

All the coverage of emdash as LLM telltale inspired me to finally bother to learn how to type an emdash on a Mac keyboard…

mikestew• 12 months ago

For those playing at home: Shift-Option-Hyphen.

msephton• 12 months ago

And on iOS long press the hyphen key.

al_borland3• 12 months ago

As someone who bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts for the em dash and ellipsis, this makes me sad.

Even in posts not using these things, I’ve been accused of being an AI bot a few times now. I’m not sure what it is I’m doing that makes people think that. My natural reaction is to double down on whatever I was trying to explain, which seems to make things worse. Such is life…

unethical_ban2• 12 months ago

I used to secretly assume any comment on reddit that uses direction quotation marks ” “ vs " " are bot or AI generated. But I believe that's just how iOS does it?

I wish a comment being completely vapid or trollish were indicator enough.

MarkusQ• 12 months ago

You could just reserve your rancor for posts that are completely vapid or trollish — and ignore the issue of how they were created.

It works for me.

whatamidoingyo2• 12 months ago

I have some blogs that make use of Markdown. " is automatically rendered as a ”. Likewise, "--" is rendered as an em dash.

zappb• 12 months ago

I assume those are people who write their comments in MS Word and copy the text with its smart quotes.

maratc• 12 months ago

that's just how iOS does it?

MacOS, too.

cwillu2• 11 months ago

On the osx keyboard layout (which you can use under linux):

    “ < altgr + [
    ” < altgr + ]

carlosjobim• 12 months ago

People are psychotic everywhere online and will accuse you of anything and everything if you're not 100% aligned with their views.

mikestorrent• 12 months ago

Very much so! I used to write responses online in the classic GPT formula with lots of bullets etc. and now I am deliberately ensuring that I don't over-formalize grammar so as to provide people with a little bit of confidence that I'm real... for what it's worth.

I used to spend a lot of time arguing online. Now, with Dead Internet Theory, it feels like it's just hammering home how useless that all was.

BizarroLand• 12 months ago

Even when you are, people are on average so paranoid and suspicious of random internet strangers with malintent that the concept of reading a response while assuming good intentions has been lost.

AlienRobot• 12 months ago

https://xkcd.com/3126

jtwoodhouse• 12 months ago

Two things are true here. The em dash shouldn’t automatically be a sign of AI writing. That said, they’re also been quite overused in recent years, which is probably causing them to be overrepresented in models.

You shouldn’t have that many asides to squeeze in, and you don’t need a em dash to make a sentence punchy. All tricks lose their power if you come to depend on them too much.

whatamidoingyo2• 12 months ago

Last year, I had a writing contract for a popular blog. They required us to use the em dash. I bet they're regretting that now.

AndyNemmity• 12 months ago

People are reading a lot of AI generated text and adopting its format as well.

nativeit• 12 months ago

That’s a great point. Let me see if I can find a new way to word my reply—specifically, I will read through the comments above this, and consider other perspectives that might be relevant—and then try to answer your question again.

That’s a great point.

kelseyfrog• 12 months ago

People are over-estimating the positive predictive value of the em dash.

If you run it through Bayes theorem, the increase in probability that a given text is AI-generated if it contains an em dash is negligible.

If you disagree share your prior, marginal, and likelihoods.

firasd• 12 months ago

(Disclosure: The Globe and Mail style guide mandates the use of en dashes, which is why you won’t see em dashes used here.)

What does this mean? You can't use an en dash as a 'dash'. It's for specialized applications like saying 1994-1995 etc. I think the author (or whoever came up with this 'rule') is confused here

crazygringo• 12 months ago

You can't use an en dash as a 'dash'.

Actually you can, and it's relatively common.

One way—like this—is to use em dashes without surrounding spaces, to denote a pause.

The other way – like this – is to use en dashes with surrounding spaces. This functions like an em dash, but is technically an en dash. The linked article has dashes like this throughout. (Then you still use an en dash for numbers like 11–13, but without the spaces.)

It's just two different typographical conventions.

Edit: to be clear, these are both still different from hyphens. In typesetting, don't ever do this-or this - as hyphens are for, well, hyphenation.

milchek• 12 months ago

This is the way that I’ve been writing for years, mainly because I was too lazy to use the key or shortcut for em dash. But also because in school no one ever made a big deal about the length of the dash when writing - or I just wasn’t paying enough attention.

perilunar• 11 months ago

What most people think of as a hyphen (the key at the top-right of the keyboard) is actually a hyphen-minus (-, U+002D). Unicode has separate hyphen (‐, U+2010) and minus (−, U+2212) symbols, as well as a couple of others.

(If you want negative numbers to look right at small font sizes use a minus sign instead of hyphen-minus.)

gucci-on-fleek• 11 months ago

I myself prefer to use em dashes in this case, but spaced en dashes are an accepted alternative:

The Chicago Manual of Style §6.89 “En dash as em dash”

In contemporary British usage, an en dash (with space before and after) is usually preferred to the em dash as punctuation in running text – like this – a practice that is followed by some non-British publications as well. See also 6.91.

The Elements of Typographic Style §5.2.1 “Use spaced en dashes…”

Use spaced en dashes – rather than close-set em dashes or spaced hyphens – to set off phrases.
[…]
In typescript, a double hyphen (--) is often used for a long dash. Double hyphens in a typeset document are a sure sign that the type was set by a typist, not a typographer. A typographer will use an em dash, three-quarter em, or en dash, depending on context or personal style. The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography. Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side.

rcarmo• 12 months ago

I have been using em dashes for over 20 years on my blog. This is just ridiculous…

jedberg• 12 months ago

As a proficient writer who has been using proper grammar and em dashes for decades, it really makes me sad that writing with proper grammar and em dashes is now suspicious.

electroly• 11 months ago

They really couldn't have used a single em dash in this article? Not even to demonstrate an em dash in a quotation?! Are violations of the The Globe and Mail style guide punishable by death?

Why the em dash is attracting unfair suspicion

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