alt Hacker NewsHot take: I think the em-dash is just lazy punctuation that can be replaced by the more nuanced pauses, i.e. the comma, semicolon, and colon. I think its popularity stems from people being confused on how to use a semicolon.
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Yeah. My problem with the em-dash is that it has too many uses (parenthetical statements, independent clause, verbal pauses) and as a reader you don't always know which one is intended until after you've read a bit past the em-dash, and might need to go back and reread the sentence once you figure out how it is supposed to be parsed. Use of semicolon and parenthesis are much clearer in contrast. The comma has the same problem to some extent. I would be happy if we could settle on consistently replacing some specific uses of comma with em-dash to make writing less ambiguous, but in the real world I find it clearer to just avoid the em-dash all around.
I find that I never have a reason to use a semicolon. Every time I typed one, it looked off, and I reformulated into 2 sentences to express things more clearly. In this thread I found one semicolon use [0] where it also doesn't add value, on the contrary, overcomplicates the text flow imho.
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I never use them to replace a comma, certainly, and only rarely a colon.
I find parenthesis often awkward or too heavy, so may use the m-dash to replace those. Especially if what might have been a parenthetical is going to terminate a sentence, an m-dash is much cleaner, as it doesn't need a closing mark, and a terminating paren right before a period looks awful. For long potential-parentheticals that do terminate before the end of the sentence, the m-dash takes up more visual space and marks the beginning and end more-visibly, making for easier scanning. One ought probably re-write to avoid parenthetical statements most of the time in the first place, when there's time, but sometimes they're desirable for stylistic reasons, or just because one lacks the time to improve a draft.
I also use it as a "classier" version of the ellipsis. It doesn't replace every use, but it replaces very-casual, colloquial use of that mark as a kind of harder-comma. Looks much better, I think, and serves the same purpose.
As for the semicolon, I'd never shy away from the semicolon when I can get away with it, but use them rarely nonetheless. I don't think I ever replace them with the m-dash, though. As inline list separators they're great and an m-dash would be an awful replacement, while as soft-periods, they're fine, though most of the time I just use a full period—but not an m-dash, not if a semicolon could have worked.
I do think they're more at-home in, say, fiction than technical writing, but I like having them in my toolbox in any case.