alt Hacker News> I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.
Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for? Together with footnotes, I've always used them like that, but I guess it could also be just a cultural difference. My teachers in Swedish school always told me to put thoughts like that into parenthesizes, but I also just (barely) finished high school, could be related too.
> I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core.
I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it. Is "created ambiguity for human writers who have historically relied upon the em dash as a stylistic device" the problem here?
Trying to solve it by adding just another character and slap the label "Human Attestation Mark (HAM)" on it will just make LLMs eventually use those instead... Not sure what the point is to be honest.
Replies
> Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for?
Parentheses add emphasis to a sentence or statement. Normally the use of it allows the sentence to be complete with or without it.
Em dashes may also add or increase emphasis but are normally treated as an aside. Think of it as a comment by the author to inject themselves, sometimes in ways which do not form a complete sentence.
For example: When you read this sentence (in your mind) it should feel complete and correct. Perhaps you read in your own voice — something I don’t normally do — or without one at all.
> I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it.
The issue is written there but may not make sense unless you know someone who stylistically writes with high-than-average em dash usage. I, for example, get inquiries and comments at work from employees who ask what LLM model I used for “generating these reports” because of the presence of em dashes. They do not believe me when I say not a single word was written by LLMs because, “there’s an em dash. Only LLMs use em dashes!” This is categorically untrue and erodes the authenticity of work from people because of the correlation.
Their aim is to implement a new Unicode character which programs like text editors could inject when a person types an em dash. It attributes to a human being behind the document, typing characters out individually. Actions like copy-pasting text in bulk wouldn’t replace em dashes since it can’t attribute a human as writing it out.
Parenthesis are for "taking a small detour from the current thought", either to add context or personal thoughts.
I use em-dash (written as "--" because I don't have an emdash key on my keyboard) as punctuation that sits between a semicolon and a period.
Punctuation in written English can be used in many ways. It's a very flexible language.
It is perfectly OK (it really is) to use parentheses -- and emdashes alike -- where they're useful; other punctuation like the semicolon, the comma, and even the Oxford comma are also OK.
There's not much that is disallowed in English. Most people have no reason to adhere to any particularly-rote style guide.