this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Fuck AI
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Are you being intentional here? They answered your question.
A normal dash, otherwise known as a hyphen, is shorter. It looks like this: -
An em-dash is a longer version of a dash, meant to be the same length as the letter m in type (thus the name) that is often used in literary devices. It looks like this —
The posts link is a blog rebuttal from a personification of that em dash itself. The reason the post was made was because ChatGPT, and other AIs, seem to use em dashes far more than normal writing works would. If you even ask it to stop using them it will just continue to do it anyway.
Does that fuckin' help?
Edit: I fixed a fuckywucky. Thanks ChaoticNeutralCzech!
Dude this is about grammar not tech. They just gave you the physical description of what an em dash looks like and why it’s different to an en dash or a hyphen. As for the grammatical uses, hyphens are for like connected words like if you say half-sister. En dashes are technically for in between dates like July 19 – July 28. (People rarely use en dashes tho) Em dashes are similar to commas or parenthesis and have a wide variety of uses. For example you could say “I grabbed my AirPods—which had a cute Toothless case—and ran to the car, hoping I wouldn’t be late for school.”