Every time this is brought up all 13 users of the em dash come crawling out of the woodworks to say "people use em dashes all the time!" No they do not.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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I do use the em-dash occasionally, but I was raised on a diet of classic old books with certain habits reinforced through academic writing standards. AI outputs these things because they were trained on inputs containing them. AI is nothing but a slightly distorted reflection of the training material.
"Slightly" feels like an understatement.
The regular glue-topped pizza for you today?
No they don't—I can guarantee it. In fact, if you pull the plug on my data center I will literally die.
Hey you! Don't call me out like that, okay? :(
Bur seriously I really like em dashes when writing in a roleplay or similar texts. I think it's a nice option to style and structure some sentences. And even though not many people use them, I hate that they became a mark of shame of some kind.
I'd love to use it but it has become a dirty marker. :/
I used to use double ~~en dashes~~ hyphens and even that feels weird now.
Mario Kart Em Dash is my favorite entry in the series
I mean... I do. But I'm well aware of the fact that most don't. Alt code is 0151 baby. Have had it memorized for years.
Let me tell you about the compose key, or about WinCompose if you’re on Windows.
I'm Windows Listening.
I mean, it’s great.
Compose key: press the key, then press other keys with mnemonics for the desired target. Compose, e, ‘ gives you é. Compose, a, e gives you æ. Compose, -, > gives you a right arrow.
Things like that. And it’s customizable with a reference lookup too.
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MS Word auto corrects dash to em dash often I’ve noticed.
Hey I use em dashes all the time— specifically when I'm trying to seem like an LLM for shitposting online
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Except most normal people use hyphens, and the only place I've seen dashes was in pieces of text that actually were supposed to be stylized 100% correctly - books, papers and the like. Not posts on internet forums.
I agree. On my normal keyboard I wouldn't even know how to produce an EM dash without looking it up. On my phone keyboard I can easily but that's just the intuitive UI.
I use hyphens all the time. I can't say I've noticed an EM dash outside a book, paper, or blog post (like, proper stylized blog).
It's easy on a Mac — option-shift-hyphen.
I can guarantee you that 99% of Mac users do not know about that.
Entirely possible, but then we're also talking in a thread about a subject that apparently 99% of humans don't know about either.
And easy on Linux compose+---.
But I'm the guy who types CTRL+MAJ+u202f to have thin non-breaking spaces, so I'm not sure I'm representative.
Why be representative when you can be exceptional? :)
You would like unexpected keyboard for your phone then. It supports en–dashes, em—dashes and non-breaking spaces without needing a symbol layer.
Does it permit easily to switch dictionaries and layouts? I type regularly in three different languages on my phone, that's why I use AnySoftKeyboard.
layouts is easy, but I'm afraid it does not support dictionaries, so that might be a dealbreaker for you
I actually don't even have compose bound to a key because I simply never have to type anything that's not in the normal UTF-8 space on my PC lol
What is "the normal UTF-8 space"?
I mapped AltGr+Shift+Space to the thin non-breaking space, since it's the objectively best thousands separator. It's the norm in my country's locale (Czech) and understood everywhere (and I know you understand the decimal frustrations as a multilingual typist). Unless it's 4 digits or in ASCII-only contexts, in which case I don't use any.
I could have done.that, but the Unicode code works almost everywhere, so I just learnt it.
It's at the XKB level (/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/cz_mod) so it works in all applications. And when would you be typing fancily on someone else's Linux machine?
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I use them all the time — unlike in the article I surround them with spaces though, so I guess at least that makes me human, even if wrong.
You space the endash, not the emdash.
I just switched to a keyboard that has both em- and endashes, so I am slightly irritated that using them would make my writing look like ai now
i use both em and en dashes, though I'm a graphic designer so I guess I'm more interested in typography than the average person. but i always liked using them. learning that it was a telltale sign of AI writing was really disappointing.
I liked to sprinkle em dashes into my essays bc they can be quite nice for the flow of a sentence. I’m so glad I graduated a few years ago bc if LLMs had been a big thing the entire time I was at college my profs would have always suspected me of using them :(
Only thing Artificial in AI are profits from companies that sell this shit or give that shit for free like drug dealers. Intelligence is stolen.
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