Em dashes and emojis
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Yes, it's nuanced but it breaks up the sentence flow in a different way. Also used for listing things. A comma is more a small pause, like this. A semicolon is used to differentiate two independent related thoughts ; it's kind of a combination between a period and a comma. A dash can be used for many things - a longer separating of thoughts, listing different points such as this, or just as an intentional emphasis to add a more protracted pause.
Your comment has a hyphen not an em dash. The point of the post is that AI likes to include em dashes, which are wildly uncommon in modern text, as most keyboards don't have a key for it
They’re pretty trivial to make in any OS — having a dedicated key isn’t necessary.
but most people, outside of professional writers and linguists, don't use them
Odd, I see them used all the time, and I’m neither. So I guess either my experience is an outlier, everyone I talk to is secretly an LLM, or maybe the meme is pushing an easy conclusion because people in general are bad at picking up on LLM responses and want an easy punctuation mark so they don’t have to think.
Weird, i hardly ever see a normal hyphen, let alone an em dash, but of course it's not a foolproof method to detect ai, just a strong indicator
Sure. Most people don't know what an OS is, let alone how to enter special characters.
I think this is something macOS does best — using shift+option hyphen is a bit quicker than alt+0151.
Long pressing the hyphen on the Google keyboard on Android also gives the option of selecting an en dash or em dash.
On Linux, if you have the compose key enabled, Compose key + three hyphens in a row will generate an em dash (en dash is two hyphens).
…well I’m definitely turning that on for my Linux machine then. Thanks for the tip.
It's convenient for a lot of things. Curly quotes, specialized dashes, mathematical symbols or Greek letters used in math/science, foreign currencies, things like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§), etc.
aah, so it's more a choice about the intended sound or flow of a text and not necessary a difference in grammatic constructs, simmiliar to using an oxford comma, or not.
interesting, i'll have to pay some attention to that, when reading.
Em dashes often replace parentheses:
Em dashes also often replace colons:
Em dashes are commonly used to denote interrupted speech:
Replacing commas is unusual and probably incorrect according to most style guides.
This is also highly localized. Style guides tend to apply only to one particular country, not all English-speaking countries. The AP guide is used by most American newspapers and magazines, and the Chicago Guide is used by most American book publishers. Each have their own rules on dashes.
It gives rhythm and flavor to your writing. Varied punctuation - where appropriate - is an easy way to spice anything up, give it a little more flavor, more control over how your words are read. There is a quote by Gary Provost that isn't specifically about punctuation but illustrates this point well, it's one of my favorites:
Damn. That's actually really cool.
Right? The written word is its own kind of instrument and I dig it