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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

The em dash is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is the output of a LLM.

My advise is to take pleasure and have confidence in good writing, over misspent energy worrying about things like this.

If you practice your skills, you will reap the rewards.

The letter 'm' is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is the output of a LLM.

No, thanks—I’ll keep using them as I always have.

Someone else said the same. How can that be when most word processors, and at least some phone keyboards, automatically insert em dashes?

It's infuriating that people are drawing this conclusion. LLMs pick up on em dash usage because professional and skilled writers use em dashes. They're a consistently useful, if niche, part of the literary toolkit.

But, no, now it's a problem because the majority of people's experience with writing is graded essays. And because LLMs emulate professionals, it's now a red flag if students write too much like professionals. What a joke.

Emily Dickinson wept—

Ha, good point, and an interesting question: What kinds of dashes did Dickinson intend?

It's a hard one to answer: We could look at published Emily Dickinson books from the time, but did Dickinson really pay that close attention to or have that much control over the type?

We could look at Dickinson's actual personal documents, but if they were handewritten, distinguishing dashes could be difficult even if there was intention there.

I imagine it would have been up to the typesetter to make the call. The conventions for dash usage are fairly straightforward. You use em-dashes for asides, en dashes for ranges, and hyphens for most other cases. Its easy to figure out the right character from context (apart from en ranges vs hyphen ranges).

Fortunately we have troves of her handwritten documents; all of her poems were first printed posthumously. To me, she's using the punctuation as pacing or tonal markers as opposed to ligatures ("I'll clutch— and clutch— " vs "I'll clutch-and clutch-"). Many publishers style these marks as longer than normal m-dashes for that reason, which makes sense seeing as they are rarely used as asides.

I interpret her marks—

as breathless pauses—

that— having no unicode—

should be given to m—

and space—

https://www.edickinson.org/editions/2/image_sets/12170035

Em-dashes have been the norm in every Dickinson poem I read, and I think it might have derived from the preferences of Victorian publishers, who I understand loved those long dashes.

Great comment. Thank you!

I had a quick search, attempting to find a great author who hated em dashes and preferred the vastly superior en dash. I found nothing.

This list of authors punctuation quirks is interesting though.

https://lithub.com/the-punctuation-marks-loved-and-hated-by-...

You want Robert Bringhurst, poet and typographic nerd. He gives them special withering attention in his Elements of Typographic Style. I think he referred to them as Victorian excrescences?

Recently ran into this. Didn't realize it was that obvious.

And you'd better not 'delve' into anything

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