Stop spamming the em dash everywhere

Worst thing ever. A different team took over some web documentation that I'd written, with various examples of Linux command-line use. They somehow round-tripped all the content through Word and all the dashes silently became em-dashes. The fun we had when users had trouble with the examples that they'd copy+pasted from the web pages!

I have noticed a strong correlation between obsessing about typesetting - and having nothing interesting to say.

People are more than happy to read text with plain old ASCII dashes instead of em dashes, if the contents are interesting. In my experience, writers who go full Patrick Bateman on fonts and dashes are usually full of hot air

Personally, I much prefer the en-GB equivalent: en dashes with a space on either side.

Typically the em dash is used without surrounding spaces. The author appears not to know.

I think this blog post is an example of negative vibes gathering media attention. It's vapid.

Sometimes I want an em dash in my markdown since it'll get translated to UTF-8 HTML—vim digraphs to the rescue! The visual difference between that and a hyphen in monospace fonts is minimal, which I always thought was a bit of a bummer. (But yeah, what can you do? Put a little "m" over it?)

Pandoc substitutes em dash for "---", which I always liked.

In summary, spam it everywhere — including in articles admonishing its overuse — because it looks cool and you know it.

It's a good thing we have well-defined fonts.

Just imagine the wide world of lines people would have to complain about if everything were still manuscripts!

Thank you, Johannes Gutenberg, for saving us all from having to stumble across those rants on HN in 2023.

"An em dash and make or break your writing."

Stream of consciousness or a typo.

stop spamming the extra spaces—the em-dash does not get spaces around it--and if you are using plain ascii, or a typewriter without a dash key, it's standard to just use two hyphens.

The time I think it's best to use an em-dash is if you have a parenthetical (like this one) but you feel--because it is off the main subject--that it is too strong a thunk in the middle of your sentence, the em-dash streamlines it. Rather than learning to type it in different contexts, I just stick with the double-hyphen approach.