this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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English usage and grammar
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What's stupid about people saying only LLMs use emdash and the sentence lists of threes, is that's exactly how we learned to write throughout our Canadian highshool curriculum.
And if you read dialog or narratation in books, its full of emdash asides in sentences.
I only recently learnt about how em-dashes had a separate name, thanks to its popularisation by people trying to detect LLMs.
Earlier, I just thought of them as just a longer dash and I used them when manually writing (often made them longer than 2 characters), but just used a normal dash when typing.