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So yeah, nothing magical here. AIs just picked up that old “academic-only” knowledge and now use it to… well, to look a bit less average. Lol.
While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still, (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
If you really want to fly below the radar you can even include instructions to adopt a certain writing style, e.g.: you can tell it to use a Gen-Z style with minimal formatting.
I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt.
My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.
Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)
Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.
As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.
For example, in the article we have:
If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.
I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
A person may have no preconceived notions about what the frobricator does. So you just list it out. But they may have plenty of preconceived notions about some more abstract-but-relatable subject. The writer anticipates that. And they have to navigate this subject at many levels at the same time, either inter-sentence or inter-paragraph; now I am talking about X, but not the X you think [the writer anticipates] but the X in itself. And not the X that group A considers, nor the one that B considers...
These subjects are more common in the “humanities”.
Certainly some authors overdo it and just seem to produce sentences with multiple semicolons and em-dashes because it’s their style/they are showing off. They are not writing clearly.
(Here I am using """""smart quotes""""".[1] Why is no one arresting me for that?)
I think we have seen a rise in the use of more intricate prose among technologists concurrent with the rise of AI penmanship. There’s more “flavor” now. Less of, either, straightforward prose or just boring and stodgy prose. More supposed personality.
Whatever the cause, this could be an emergent property of authors competing for readership by writing on the same subject but in a more supposedly engaging and personal way. And if an author who doesn’t like writing prose but wants to promote something regardless could get help from a program which happens to be literate in English as well? Well. Now it is easier to ramp up the word count.
> > If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
Now the sentence says something different. The original said: If your goal is to get people to read ... And hopefully also enjoy.
Just getting people to read has the primacy in the original.
> > If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
This is certainly how I expect a programmer to write.
> Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
Some groups of people ponder the great questions of life.[2] Programmers ponder if there is really a categorical difference, in principle, between their own consciousness and that of their smart fridge. And whether em-dash users are bots.
It is a cultural difference.
[1]: And these are mock-quotes
[2]: Most of whom in a misguided or confused way.
If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.
Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
<!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.
To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
A lot of people who care about typography/grammar have spent a moment to learn to do this. Once learned, you can use it for the rest of your life.
Not that it matters since I type such characters with my keybored directly. There are dozens of us.
[0] https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html
[1] https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-...
Literacy starts with consuming texts and doesn’t stop once you have learned to read comfortably. People who consume a more varied selection of prose than, say, programming mailing lists will have seen plenty of em-dashes in their time and won’t balk at people using normal punctuation.
It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.
It's been that way throughout history.
The latter is barely used, but is the right way to indicate dates like 2023-25.
The more you know!
Some of us found out we were typography nerds and didn't know it until then.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!