this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Typography & fonts
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From the article:
Ok, look. I don't have an em dash button on my keyboard. I do have a hyphen button. If I want an em dash in my writing, I have to go and hunt for one, or I use Word, which loooves to swap in those em dashes even when I just want a hyphen. I ain't gonna pump my text through Word when I'm just hammering out a reply to someone online.
So that's the big clue here that I think the author is missing. Posts like mine right here - that I'm swiping out on Gboard right now on my phone - they're not going to have em dashes.
Posts generated by AI bots, who've been trained on a corpus chock full of em dashes because of Word and other helpful typesetting software, they're much more likely to have them, along with bullet points, neat summarising conclusions, and that blandness you only get when you ingest a trillion properly formatted documents to statistically regurgitate later.
I do—on mobile—and I love it.
Gboard has mdash.
Yes, after digging around, I found em dash.
The sequence for me to get one is:
And ta-da! — an em dash.
Considering that my default mode of typing is swipe where I can spit out this sentence in about 15 seconds, they're not going to be used much by me.
And quite possibly the proportion of em dash users in a typography community is a little bit skewed and maybe not representative of the general internet, haha