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Comment by hayleox | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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`.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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