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Comment by hn_user2 | Hacker News Reader

Humans use em dash as well.

I hate that I have had to remove it from my writing style because people assume it’s AI generated. But I think that ship has sailed. I’ll have to do without now.

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How do you type the em dash. I thought the point about the em dash "—" is, that it is longer than the normal minus "-". Humans normally have no way to produce it, cause there is no key on the keyboard.

At least in macOS there is a key for that on the keyboard, Shift + Option + Hyphen (-). This information is a quick internet search away.

Macos, ios, google docs, and microsoft word will autocorrect two hyphens to an em dash, which is how I normally type it. On a mac you can also type an em dash with option-shift-hyphen.

dash dash "--" on a lot of systems and word processors turns it into the em-dash automatically

Being Hacker News, a lot of us use programmable IDEs & keyboards. I added em dash support to both Emacs and Dygma keyboard.

Many word processors (Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, etc.) and some online editors will auto convert double hyphens "--" as they are typed into an em dash.

Some text editors replace the -- (two separate dashes) with a proper em-dash. Literate people - who understand why em dash exists - have been using it all the time. Thats, after all, how the models learned to use it.

OMG — I'm a robot.

Parentheses usually read better anyway.

Parens are ok for short asides (like this) but unreadable for longer asides and not usable for compound sentences like the emdash. Unfortunately, neither ellipses nor semicolons can exactly replace the compounding ability of the emdash, I find the best option without it is often to just split a sentence in two.

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