alt Hacker NewsAn honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
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I wish more people had casual exposure to professional translators. Its a deeply important, vanishingly small segment of the human population and has been this way for at least many thousands of years. Also, it will continue to be!
My first rule—before doing anything else—when writing a sentence, is to check whether I could have removed the em dashes by re-ordering the elements.
Update: in case it’s not obvious, I am sorry. I could not help it.
Em dashes are really good actually and a standard stylistic choice for non-technical writing, particularly outside the US.
My writing used to be littered with them, but I now eschew the em in favour of en, as it has become too strong an anti-shibboleth.
I have also taken to being sloppier in my prose, as I’ve had stories rejected for being “written by AI” - when they’re shorts I wrote more than a decade ago. Reworked them to sound like a moron, accepted. Sigh.
Either it's LLM generated, or it's written by someone who wants to be ambiguous about using LLMs.
Either way, I'm not reading it, it's a clanker or a clanker collaborationist.
I mean, how would you even write an em dash? There's no button in the keyboard for em dashes, it's not in ascii, it's just not something we write in internet text with, it's a safety watermark put into LLMs by OpenAI to help making LLM generated content identifiable as such.
If for some reason you are an em dash lover that was hurt by the LLM debacle, I'm so sorry for your loss, but look who's on your side, give the em dash a funeral and let it go.
First sentence:
> In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had.
The em-dash matches how you'd speak out loud.
You'd say "I take two classes every Tuesday back to back, boxing and 'body sculpt'. Weird name." (Parts of that sentence did flow oddly, but not because of the em-dash).
Grammarians say you can't make those separate sentences without adding some extra words, and because of blah-de-blah-blah-blah, someone might say you can't join them with a comma. So we have an em-dash.
Rewriting the sentence would make it flow less naturally, not more.