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bccdeelast Sunday at 2:24 AM2 repliesview on HN

To be fair, LLMs usually use em-dashes correctly, whereas I think this document misuses them more often than not. For example:

> This can be extraordinarily powerful for summarizing documents — or of answering more specific questions of a large document like a datasheet or specification.

That dash shouldn't be there. That's not a parenthetical clause, that's an element in a list separated by "or." You can just remove the dash and the sentence becomes more correct.


Replies

the_aflast Sunday at 4:11 AM

I don't know whether that use of the em-dash is grammatically correct, but I've seen enough native English writers use it like that. One example is Philip K Dick.

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NobodyNadalast Sunday at 3:53 AM

LLMs also generally don't put spaces around em dashes — but a lot of human writers do.

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