An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
> In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had.
The em-dash matches how you'd speak out loud.
You'd say "I take two classes every Tuesday back to back, boxing and 'body sculpt'. Weird name." (Parts of that sentence did flow oddly, but not because of the em-dash).
Grammarians say you can't make those separate sentences without adding some extra words, and because of blah-de-blah-blah-blah, someone might say you can't join them with a comma. So we have an em-dash.
Rewriting the sentence would make it flow less naturally, not more.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said colon…
With writing I find I'm drafting the flow for readability and clarity as I'm writing, so I go back and rework bits and pieces — sometimes even while I'm in the middle to typing a sentence. Maybe it's because I write code for a living.
Speech only moves forward and you have to state your retractions or clarifications on the go. You can't go back and edit what you've said.
I've been trying to use speech-to-text a bit to: a) give my hands a bit of a break when I'm writing prose, and b) see if it's faster than typing.
I find there are long pauses while I'm struggling to draft what I'm going to say to what I want written, so I'm not sure if it is faster (given that I'm a ten finger touch typist so can type pretty fast is short bursts, and the time spent going back and tidying up the output which is somewhat tedious). It might improve with more practice.
— No tokens were harmed in the production of this comment. —
And here I am, brain the size of a galaxy, and I fumble my way through every language I speak other than English.
Serious respect for the linguists.
Wow, aren't you humble.
Update: in case it’s not obvious, I am sorry. I could not help it.
FTFY
To me they come off as faddish, with many writers using them where commas and semicolons would have done just as well. I think their popularity stems from teh fact that provide the sense of a personal aside from the writer, allowing them to be more expressive while clearly delineating the personal or contextual remark from the main flow of the prose. No doubt this works for a lot of readers, but I find it tedious.
You can restructureany sentence to use fewer forms of punctuation -- but if you do that, you'll lose nuance. And nuance, in writing, is a very fine thing.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E2%80%93&year...
It's also notable that the em-dash is approved in American Manuals of Style, while discouraged in British ones. I was unable to find longitudinal data for the em-dash's use in magazines, blogs etc., but AI summaries suggest it's 3-4 times more used in those contexts than in news reports.
Like strawberry ice cream or apple pie, nuance is certainly a fine thing; but a surfeit of it becomes cloying, and the antipathy toward the omnipresence of the em-dash in LLM-generated prose, along with other kinds of literary expression like contrast and comparison, suggests to me that people have had more than enough of it.
Also, I like em dashes.
And if this is my worst sin, so be it.
I have also taken to being sloppier in my prose, as I’ve had stories rejected for being “written by AI” - when they’re shorts I wrote more than a decade ago. Reworked them to sound like a moron, accepted. Sigh.
They have different meaning and are not interchangeable.
But now I find myself adding noise and imperfections to my writing (not that it was perfect) to make it more human, which is kinda silly.
Either way, I'm not reading it, it's a clanker or a clanker collaborationist.
I mean, how would you even write an em dash? There's no button in the keyboard for em dashes, it's not in ascii, it's just not something we write in internet text with, it's a safety watermark put into LLMs by OpenAI to help making LLM generated content identifiable as such.
If for some reason you are an em dash lover that was hurt by the LLM debacle, I'm so sorry for your loss, but look who's on your side, give the em dash a funeral and let it go.
Followed by, “You should abandon your preferences because I don’t share them”.
Language, communication, are more like the latter, communicarion benefits from everyone using a common language, except when that niche sociolect is domain specific, which an emdash isn't.
> I mean, how would you even write an em dash?
It's been seared into my muscle memory for more than a decade. I keep using it, too. It's present in the popular training sets – and then in LLM outputs – simply because it's proper punctuation.
Sorry if I like em dashes.
It's alt + 151 BTW.
Slang for an AI, used by a Blade Runner
With a keyboard shortcut. Just because you are incompetent, that does not mean everybody is.