this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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I've been accused of being a chatbot before.
No, I'm just autistic
Did you use em dashes?
No—do you?
I do—they’re great!
I like to think of them as Mmmmm 💕—dashes!
I love em dashes. My colleagues had asked me to remove them because "it doesn't exist in the wild, it makes your text look AI generated." No! AI has taken soo much already from creative humanity, it won't take yet another method of personal literary expression—my personal expression—as well.
Besides, I'm all over the place—hardly concise. Anyone who thinks I'm using AI just by using em dashes should really reevaluate how they spot AI in the wild, as well as read a book—it's where you'll find all the em dashes in the wild.
You'd think I would have learned the keyboard shortcut by now, but no, I'm just really fast at opening the Character Map and copying it manually. I've found a number of useful symbols to add to my random comments & SMS messages in there. I'm just a regular μblogger, truly. If I spent ⅒ of the time I spend making random comments actually solving worthwhile problems, I'd be rich. Or happy. Or… something like that. C’est la vie. At least I know the difference between Unicode U+02D7, U+2010 – U+2015, U+2043, U+2212, and U+2E3A. There are more, but I really need sleep more than I need to find every horizontal line in all of Unicode.
Compose key and 3 minus signs for an em dash. Compose key, 2 minus signs, and a space for an en dash
if that's a reference to something I don't know it
In typography there are three distinct lengths of dash-like symbols:
Traditionally em dashes are used for punctuation—such as to separate clauses where the second clause expands on the first.
En dashes are used for ranges, like 1–7, or to join words or phrases together.
Hyphens are used within words, such as to indicate compound-words.
I think people were more particular about these uses when using typewriters. Like you could type two hyphens, and that would get you the same length as an em dash, and would look like one continuous symbol.
Nowadays the hyphen is the only easy dash to type, and it doesn't look like one continuous line when typed twice. So instead of using an em dash people often use a hyphen with spaces around it, and people tend to use hyphens for ranges too. But ChatGPT knows the typography rules, and it likes to be technically correct.
I'll note that I've just found that on Android you can get em or en dashes pretty easily by showing symbols, and then doing a long-press on the hyphen symbol.
———
Not written by ChatGPT, I'm just like this
Crap I’ve been doing it wrong. I just use a regular hyphen - like this…
That's not true in general. I personally use the German Extended (E1) layout (when I'm not on mobile) and the em dash is super easy to type. There are also lots of other custom layouts used by people who care about typesetting.
Even people that don't internationally care about typesetting sometimes use them because their tool (like Word and some CMS systems) automatically replace hyphens in specific places with em dashes, or substitute straight double quotes with the correct quotation marks (depending on which country you are from)
And on macOS, you can usually get an en dash with option dash and em dash with shift option dash
I care more about typesetting than the average feller, but LaTeX lets you use three hyphens (
---) to form an em-dash. Didn't know any layouts had a key/chord for 'em.