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Comment by makingstuffs | Hacker News Reader

Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.

Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious.

And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.

Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”

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It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?

If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

Also on phones it is really easy to use em dashes. It's quite out in the open whether I posted from desktop or phone because the use of "---" vs "—" is the dead give-away.

Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.

That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.

I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.

>That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.

Yes, that is more or less what "hot take" means.

That'll show em'.

agree. it implies a strong relationship between the two words it is inserted between - not the sentences.

I don't know if my language grammar rules (Italian) are different than English, but I've always seen spaces before and after em-dashes. I don't like the em-dash being stuck to two unrelated words.

It's a US thing

That's because in Italian, like in many other European languages, you use en-dashes to separate parenthetical clauses. The en-dash is used with space, the em-dash (mostly) without space and that's why it's longer. On old typewriters they were frequently written as "--" and "---" respectively. So yes, it's mostly an English thing. Stick to your trattinos, they're nice!

How do you find yourself using en dashes more than em dashes?

Maybe they write out a lot of ranges?

For me I use en dashes a lot for ranges like 1–N

Not OP, but I find the space-en-space convention easier to read than the nospace-em-nospace convention. American style guides prefer the latter – in my eyes they are wrong about that

They're wrong about preferring the style you find easier to read?

Did you mean American style guides prefer the latter?

brain fart, fixed

I am more likely to separate two thoughts with space-endash-space than with an em dash and no spaces. It just feels weird to not type spaces, and I don't want to do space-emdash-space because that would feel like an enormous gap; if the two clauses need that much distance from each other, why not just split them into two sentences?

I'm sure this goes against many style guides, but for everyday use it's what feels most natural to me.

I configured my system to treat caps lock as compose, and also set up a bunch of custom compose sequences that better suit how I think about the fancy characters I most often want to type. My em-dash is `Compose m d`.

I've had alt+0150 (–) and alt+0151 (—) memorized for over a decade at this point and frequently use them. It sucks that they're just associated with AI nowadays (along with the poor Oxford comma).

And lists! I love to use lists and blather a lot. It was from me that AI learned that:

  * Answers should be really lengthy even if you aren't saying much
  * Lists are the perfect vehicle to layout your ideas
  * Good things come in 3s.

But alas, my wonderful style of internet comments now look tooooo good, like an AI generated them.

I don't use many emoji's though -- that's one way AI has gone wrong.

As a brit I'd say we tend to use "en-dashes", slightly shorter versions - so more similar to a hyphen and so often typed like that - with spaces either side.

I never saw em-dashes—the longer version with no space—outside of published books and now AI.

The en-dash is also highly worthy!

Just to say, though, we em-dashers do have pre-GPT receipts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673869

It's also easy to get them in LaTeX: just type --- and they will appear as an em-dash in your output.

Came here to confirm this. I grew up learning BrE and indeed in BrE, we were taught to use en-dash. I don't think we were ever taught em-dash at all. My first encounter with em-dash was with LaTeX's '---' as an adult.

Besides the LaTeX use, on Linux if you have gone into your keyboard options and configured a rarely-used key to be your Compose key (I like to use the "menu" key for this purpose, or right Alt if on a keyboard with no "menu" key), you can type Compose sequences as follows (note how they closely resemble the LaTeX -- or --- sequences):

Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period: produces – (en dash) Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen: produces — (em dash)

And many other useful sequences too, like Compose, lowercase o, lowercase o to produce the ° (degree) symbol. If you're running Linux, look into your keyboard settings and dig into the advanced settings until you find the Compose key, it's super handy.

P.S. If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.

> If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.

There are compose key implementations for Windows, too.

I think that's just incorrect. There are varying conventions for spaces vs no spaces around em dashes, but all English manuals of style confine to en dashes just to things like "0–10" and "Louisville–Calgary" — at least to my knowledge.

The Oxford style guide page 18 https://www.ox.ac.uk/public-affairs/style-guide

> m-dash (—)

> Do not use; use an n-dash instead.

> n-dash (–)

> Use in a pair in place of round brackets or commas, surrounded by spaces.

Remember I'm specifically speaking about british english.

HMRC style guide: "Avoid the shorter en dash as they are treated differently by different screen readers" [0].

But I see what you mean. There used to be a distinction between a shorter dash that is used for numerical ranges, or for things named after multiple people, and a longer dash used to connect independent clauses in a sentence [1]. I am shocked to hear that this distinction is being eroded.

[0] https://design.tax.service.gov.uk/hmrc-content-style-guide/

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tmj32/styleguide/

That guy's style guide seems to conflict with the Cambridge editorial services guidelines - though that is for books rather than papers:

> Spaced en rules (or ‘en dashes’) must be used for parenthetical dashes. Hyphens or em rules (‘em dashes’) will not be accepted for either UK or US style books. En rules (–) are longer than hyphens (-) but shorter than em rules (—).

Section 2.1, "Editorial services style guide for academic books" https://www.cambridge.org/authorhub/resources/publishing-gui...

There are British style manuals (e.g., the Guardian’s) that prefer em-dashes for roughly the same set of uses they tend to perferred for in US style guides, but it is mixed between em-dashes and en-dashes (both usually set open), while all the influential American style guides prefer em-dashes (but split, for digressive/parenthetical use, between setting them closed [e.g., Chicago Manual] and open [e.g., AP Style].)

I would add that a lot of us who were born or grew up in the UK are quite comfortable saying stuff like "you're right, but...", or even "I agree with you, but...". The British politeness thing, presumably.

0-24 in the UK, 24-62 in the USA, am now comfortable saying "I could be wrong, but I doubt it" quite a lot of the time :)

Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.

You’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!

If you want next, I can:

- Tell you what makes em dashes appealing.

- Help you use em dashes more.

- Give you other grammatical quirks smart people have.

Just tell me.

(If bots RP as humans, it’s only natural we start RP as bots. And yes, I did use a curly quote there.)

No problem! But it's also important to consider your image online. Here are some reasons not to use em-dashes in Internet forum posts:

* **Veneer of authenticity**: because of the difficulty of typing em-dashes in typical form-submission environments, many human posters tend to forgo them.

* **Social pressure**: even if you take strides to make em-dashes easier to type, including them can have negative repercussions. A large fraction of human audiences have internalized a heuristic that "em-dash == LLM" (which could perhaps be dubbed the "LLM-dash hypothesis"). Using em-dashes may risk false accusations, degradation of community trust, and long-winded meta discussion.

* **Unicode support**: some older forums may struggle with encoding for characters beyond the standard US-ASCII range, leading to [mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake).

Also, I've seen people edit, one-by-one, each m-dash. And then they copy-paste the entire LLM output, thinking it looks less AI-like or something.

Oof. I don't know what's worse there: that they don't know a conventional way to find-and-replace, or that they didn't try asking the LLM not to use them. (Or to fix it afterwards.)

Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.

But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down?

You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.

No. En-dash doesn't work "just as well" as an em-dash, anymore than a comma works as an apostrophe. They are different punctuation marks.

Also, I was a curmudgeon with strong opinions about punctuation before ChatGPT—heck, even before the internet. And I can produce witnesses.

They mean the same thing to 99.999% of the population.

In British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces.

It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma.

Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more recent than some people seem to believe.

Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up this habit. Probably from the web.

It can also depend on the medium. Typically, newspapers (e.g. the AP style guide) use spaces around em-dashes, but books / Chicago style guide does not.

Em-dashes are easy to type on a macos laptop for what it's worth: option-shift-minus.

Also on Linux when you enable the compose key: alt-dash-dash-dash (--- → —) and for the en-dash: alt-dash-dash-dot (--. → –)

That's not as easy as just hitting the hyphen key, nor are most people going to be aware that even exists. I think it's fair to say that the hyphen is far easier to use than an em dash.

The thing with em-dashes is not the em-dash itself. I use em-dashes, because when I started to blog, I was curious about improving my English writing skills (English is not my native language, and although I have learned English in school, most of my English is coming from playing RPGs and watching movies in English).

According to what I know, the correct way to use em-dash is to not surround it by spaces, so words look connected like--this. And indeed, when I started to use em-dashes in my blog(s), that's how I did it. But I found it rather ugly, so I started to put spaces around it. And there were periods where I stopped using em-dash all together.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you write as a profession, most people are inconsistent. Sometimes, I use em-dashes. Sometimes I don't. In some cases I capitalize my words where needed, and sometimes not, depending on how in a hurry I am, or whether I type from a phone (which does a lot of heaving lifting for me).

If you see someone who consistently uses the "proper" grammar in every single post on the internet, it might be a sign that they use AI.

I am a native English speaker and I agree with you completely that em-dashes look better when surrounded by spaces rather than connected directly to the words.

I'm in your camp, that both of these are appropriate for some situations. In particular I like starting with a variation on "you're absolutely right" when it appears my interlocutor has identified the wrong disagreement, before realigning the conversation to a more useful direction (though of course there are many phrases that accomplish that).

It's still frequently identifiable in (current-generation) LLM text by the glossy superficiality that comes along with these usages. For example, in "It's not just X, it's Y", when a human does this it will be because Y materially adds something that's not captured by X, but in LLM output X and Y tend to be very close in meaning, maybe different in intensity, such that saying them both really adds nothing. Or when I use "You're absolutely right" I'll clarify what they are right about, whereas for the LLM it's just an empty affirmation.

You’re absolutely right. It’s not just a writing style, it’s how the ideas are expressed.

On my side of the Atlantic using en-dashes with spaces on either side of the dash is acceptable writing style so that’s what I use (instead of em-dashes). However, many people can’t tell the difference between the two so some might confuse my writing from that of an LLM. But I’m not going to let that dictate my writing style.

For the past 15 years, I’ve used the Unicycle Vim plugin¹ which makes it very easy to add proper typographic quotes and dashes in Insert mode. As something of a typography nerd, I’ve extended it to include other Unicode characters, e.g., prime and double-prime characters to represent minutes and seconds.

At the same time, I’ve always used a Firefox extension that launches GVim when editing a text box; currently, I’m using Tridactyl for this purpose.

¹ https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1384

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, aren't the LLMs actually trained to look like human language? So whatever particular "quirk" you have as a writer, there is probably an LLM emulating that either wholesale, or like 50% of the times.

LLMs use em-dash because people (in their training data) used em-dash. They use "You're absolutely right" because that's a common human phrase. It's not "You write like an LLM", it's "The LLMs write kind of like you", and for good reasons, that's exactly what people been training them to do.

And yes, "pun" intended for extra effect, that also comes from humans doing it.

The LLM output isn't an unfiltered result of an unbiased model. Rather, some texts may be classified high-quality (where the em-dash, curly quotes, a more sophisticated/less-everyday vocabulary are more expected to appear), some low-quality, and some choices are driven by human feedback (aka fine-tuning), either to improve quality (OpenAI employs Kenyans, Kenyan/Nigerian English considered more colonial) or engagement through affirmative/reinforcing responses ("You're absolutely right. Universe is indeed a donut. Want me to write down an abstract? Want me to write down the equations?"). Some nice relevant articles are [1],[2].

[1]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-...

> I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.

Likewise. I used to copy/paste them when I couldn't figure out how to actually type them, lol. Or use the HTML char code `—` It sucks that good grammar now makes people assume you used AI.

I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about this thread. I have it top of mind because I participated and was extremely frustrated about, not just the AI slop, but how much the author claimed not to use AI when they obviously used it.

You can read it yourself if you'd like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46589386

It was not just the em dashes and the "absolutely right!" It was everything together, including the robotic clarifying question at the end of their comments.

Did you paste the wrong link? While the OP of that thread was accussed of using LLMs, the thread doesn't really match what the article describes.

I think this one is a much closer fit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308

Well the dialogue there involves two or more people, when commenting, why would you use that.. Even if you have collaborators, you wouldn't very likely be discussing stuff through code comments..

Most of my Wikipedia edits are converting tacky hyphens to em-dashes. I also autocomplete into em-dashes.

hyphens are so hideous that I can't stand them.

When that baseline erodes, even normal human quirks start looking suspicious

found the LLM bot guys!

Sorry but I don’t believe you about em dashes. I don’t recall ever seeing them in online content or comments before LLM’s got popular. Normal dashes for sure, but no one actually dug out special character for it

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