Em dashes and emojis
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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You are vastly underestimating the amount of people who don't use em dashes at all.
They don't but the word processing software they likely use autocorrects them in. What's next, proper semi-colon use and Oxford commas means you're a bot?
Spelling & Grammar tool just wreaking havok.
I've seen more proper use of the semicolon and oxford commas than em dashes. The em dash is a lot more esoteric, that won't change.
I don’t have a good sense of this since I am a trained writer. Is it really so low that one would reasonably conclude an AI wrote something with them?
Using honest to goodness em dashes instead of just a hyphen - pretty uncommon.
Even a hyphen would be pretty unusual in a real text message, because they're more annoying to get than other common punctuation on the phone keyboard, and autocomplete won't put them in.
In a chat app, a hyphen would probably be somewhat common since it's right there on the keyboard, but a true em dash would be pretty unusual since most chat apps aren't going to be doing autocorrect like a word processor would, and you'd have to use the magic key combination to insert it.
But we don't have the original text so we can't tell if the original author confused a hyphen with an em dash, though
It's basically unseen outside of professionally written stuff. Most people use commas. But AI like to use them a fair bit, more than the average internet user.
It seems like AI is mostly trained on academic writing then. Very interesting.