alt Hacker NewsEm dashes are amazing
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One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted:
- − (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...
You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B).
Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.
Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'
I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?
Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash.
I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based).
(ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)
Em dashes—if properly used—are really useful.
They help convey that I am so smart—and I think so fast—that I have to constantly interrupt myself.
But—and I think this is important—it’s really easy to overuse them.
I'm reminded of a remark I read somewhere that the em dash is "almost excessively versatile."
> As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash
All that energy spent on punctuation, and still: comma splices. ):
Troglodyte here... I never use em dashes, never use semicolons, overuse ellipses and commas.
If you are at all interested in punctuation---and especially the em-dash---I highly recommend Nicholson Baker's essay "Survival of the Fittest" in the NYRB:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-...
I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994, sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.
LLMs abuse em-dashes by putting them in places where a comma would be more appropriate. Especially as the separator before the last item in a list (in place of an "Oxford comma"). Classic LLM-speak em-dash mistreatment is something like, "This design brings performance, power — and speed."
They also like to use em-dashes excessively, especially in bulleted lists, to separate a topic from a comment in each list item.
Avoid those and you're fine. They aren't good writing style anyway. Used well, em-dashes are good!
About 15-20 years ago the em dash became popular in the Russian web-design community because, surprisingly, it is the proper character to use. Using "-" was a sign of low-quality work. I remember I even wrote a small app in C#, so I could have it on the screen, click a button, and get "—", "«" or "»" in the clipboard ("«" and "»" also mattered, because " is not really a legitimate character in Russian typography).
Since before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dataset of middlebrow American news blogs and similar sources. So I'm not surprised that the em dash has stuck out to people as such a prominent feature of its style. It definitely has its uses but I can't say I would mind at all if the controversy diminished its use in real writing.
Nothing wrong with CMOS/APA/MLA dashes, I quite like them but usage in LLM prose has ruined it for me. AP dashes are weird, too much horizontal spacing, looks horrible and can really erode typographic color sometimes. "International" Oxford/Cambridge spaced dashes is nicest.
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.
This post only makes the case for em dashes from a writing and expression point of you. But it misses why people now distrust em dashes - it's not about sentence structure or expression, it's the symbol itself.
I have a question to all em dash users reading this - why wouldn't I just use a regular dash in place of the normal full-length character? I have already done this several times in this very comment, and it's a very common convention on the internet. Outside publishing and other types of very high-brow writing, the fifty different variations of dashes with minor differences in length are pretty pointless, in my opinion. There's almost no scenarios where you need to make a distinction between them, what could possibly be misinterpreted because of dash length? So why not just use the regular, standard dash everywhere?
This post is so self-consciously dependent on inserting em dashes everywhere that it kinda supports its own counterargument. If you're going to make a case for em dashes enabling more fluid writing and more distinctive voice, then you ought to actually use them that way.
AI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.
One thing I've always loved about Apple's OSs is that they will render an em dash if you press-and-hold the hyphen key.
Great accessibility.
Can't help it. I like em dashes in works of fiction (e.g., C.J. Cherryh); I also find em dashes improve technical writing (for me).
Sometimes adding spaces around em dashes is not about preference, but helpful due to the font, or the device, you're reading on. At some zoom-levels, for example, an em dash may bump into an italicized word unless there's a bit of extra space.
My problem with AI use of em-dashes is that it covers up sloppy writing. I simply collected about six examples of horrible use of em-dashes and how I would have written the text. This became part of my SKILL for general writing (along with a lot of other specific examples).
If you love em dashes and commas you will also love this https://archive.ph/0dxpW from the newyorker by Mary Norris.
I was never a big reader as a kid, but I fell in love with the New Yorker, much later in life, where I kind of adopted their idea of: "Once you understand them, you can read through long sentences very easily". That is the newyorker style of writing. One falls into two buckets, you love that kind of writing or you hate it. If its the latter, you should adopt em-dashes and commas to improve your writing style.
I'm used to often using both — and … when I write something (even short informal messages).
One advantage of my ESL english is that the text I produce doesn't look that much AI generated anyway…
I did not know option + shift + hyphen produced an em dash. I've always used a double hyphen as a stand in -- as I did just now. LLMs don't do it and I haven't been accused yet. Though, more likely, I'm not popular enough for people to notice!
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.
Em dashes really came on my radar, and I started using and appreciating them after reading Barack Obama's AMA on Reddit. His responses there felt very personal, genuine, and conversational and I think a lot of it had to do with the way he used em dashes (although, looking back at it now, they weren't "proper" em dashes).
I didn't know that AP style recommended spaces either side of the em dash. Here in the UK we generally use en dashes instead, and I thought em dashes always had no spaces. Apparently the wire machines that AP sent their news out by in olden times couldn't always do en dashes.
> ...on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.
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.
Ever since the em-dash AI association, I've instructed my blog to use em dashes everywhere:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/a-proclamation-regardi...
I love the author's attitude. In my writing, I'll probably consider using en dashes ("-") in place of em dashes ("—") in the way he describes.
While it technically won't be grammatically correct, it'll get the benefits he describes in the article while also not being accused of being AI-generated.
I am overjoyed with how many commenters we have here who enjoy talking about typography.
I'm unreasonably fond of the numero symbol (№), although I've never quite settled on whether it should be followed immediately by the number or whether there should be a (non-breaking, potentially thin) space between them. Although it does tend to look awful in monospace fonts.
> Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes?
Some people even take pride on being able to detect (often falsely) AI generated work.
LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.
There were too many em-dashes in this article, so I think it was written with AI.
i typically enjoy a good profanity-laden rant, but something about this particular one feels very forced. this sentence, for example: "[...] What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.". i cant really put my finger on why, but it almost feels like the author wrote their rant, then came back afterwards with a quota of fuck/shit/bitch they wanted to meet, placing them wherever they could.
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.
I don't like them, I don't like text editors changing the literal text that I type. I think we should just use double dash -- instead.
Em dashes are indeed amazing! Go U+2014 !
has anyone used/seen em dashes in file/dir names? just wondered — I have't.
It's certainly easier to read than a hyphen/minus...but i guess it may become problematic cross-platform (on windows/linux it isn't as straight forward as on macos).
I'm all for Unicode if you want to say something like 你好 but separate nearly similar characters, like the different kinds of dashes, feel somehow wasteful. I prefer to stick with things that align with ASCII.
Typesetting aside, the em-dash as a grammatical construct is indeed pretty great.
I never see emdashes squeezed tightly to the word before them.
I only ever see them with an AP-style spacing before and after.
I miss being able to use em dashes and not be accused of being a robot.
We should pronounce punctuation (Victor Borge)
I think Em dashes are fine in fiction where you're listening to someone's train of thought or something sudden happens, but they are really annoying in non-fiction.
I get it. But I never would have until I built muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut.
Just use -- to signal you're a human. That and two spaces after periods :)
half the thread is people arguing about en dashes vs em dashes and the other half is people who just found out there are two kinds of dashes. typography is the only field where knowing the difference makes you more upset, not less
I honestly couldn't tell if the author was writing satire (about AI writing detection?) or is just an idiot who doesn't understand why we have language rules to facilitate communication.
I want to think it's the latter, but it's so exquisitely stupid I keep thinking it's "stupid on purpose".
Spent the whole essay typing them incorrectly. There should not be spaces surrounding an emdash.
I really don't get liking em dashes. Just use two sentences or modify your original one. Both options are clearer like 90% of the time.
I think the Em dash fans are quitters ⸻ there are much longer dashes in Unicode they can use.
> on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen
And on Windows it's Alt + 0151 on the numeric keypad, which means you a) must have a numeric keypad and remember the number, or b) must use the emoji search. And on Linux it's weird too.
Em dashes are therefore Mac user garbage. The correct replacement is --
I just use hyphens all the time and always have. I don’t like that AI loves em dashes so much that it looks like everything I write now is AI generated, but if you were to deep dive you’d notice I’m using hyphens - never em dashes - so my writing can’t be AI. Granted you’d have to be pretty pedantic to care in the first place but it’s 2026 and here we are.
Thank you, I also love using them.
Author failed to explain the dash universe and their semantic assignments.
- 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 to this "essay" … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is personal.
I offer this feedback as a humorously offended fan of all sidecar prose (dash, ellipsis, parens, quotes, and meta typographical treatments) 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.