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 like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?

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.

- − (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...

Turn off smart punctuation.

Saves bytes.

Great accessibility.

Some people even take pride on being able to detect (often falsely) AI generated work.

Hell yes, and ROFL. I’m tired of em dashes being cited as evidence of AI.

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 only ever see them with an AP-style spacing before and after.

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.

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.

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)

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 ($-$).

(sorry for a bit of gaslighting)

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.

- 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 … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is prosaic.

I offer this feedback as a humorously offended fan of all sidecar prose 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.