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Comment by Xss3 | Hacker News Reader

Em dashes are still appropriate for articles, journals, scientific papers, and other academic or professional writing.

In social media comments they came across as pompous even before LLMs and werent particularly appropriate for casual comments.

Though to be fair some people enjoy coming across as pompous and embrace the 'better than the peasants and their lowly minus sign use' attitude. Makes them feel special or as if their writing is markedly better than those without fancy punctuation. (It isnt).

Also yes, im describing two writers i know that are adamant about the em dash being 'a sign of an intellectual wtiter'...they are insufferable pricks.

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I use em dashes for the same reason that I use semicolons: it’s how I’m hearing the sentence in my head as I’m typing it.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call a part of grammar pompous. It’d be analogous with me calling your post lazy due to its various typos — I’m not, I just found the comparison apt.

I would love to know what sequence of characters you normally use in place of an em-dash to express the same nuance of relationship and timing.

Not the GP, but I often just use commas and parenthetical asides (like this).

It's a different stylistic choice (em dashes are nice and all), but it's not how I think, and my writing reflects how I think.

I also will often use the fabled semicolon. It's easy to use with contrasting statements, but that's not its only use; I can use them in some situations to elaborate where em dashes are used.

I'm not saying they are a perfect replacement for em dashes (again, em dashes are cool), but it's just always been my personal style.

> I also will often use the fabled semicolon

I regularly use the semicolon, especially in a sentence where this are commas use in another way. In my mind, a semicolon is a "greater" separator than a comma; used to separate parts of thought in the same sentence (vs grouping of items or a pause).

The problem to me doesn’t seem to be the em dashes but rather the multiple people around you that actively talk about “being an intellectual writer“ and how they need to signal it with their choice of punctuation. Frankly they sound ridiculous. But again, that has nothing to do with the actual punctuation itself. Writing off a writing tool because of two people you agree are ridiculous doesn’t seem like the right way to respond to their behavior.

I’ve used it for literally decades for both formal and informal writing. On social media and in text messages. It is a very useful way to communicate/pace your sentences.

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