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Comment by douglee650 | Hacker News Reader

Author failed to explain the dash universe and their semantic assignments.

- em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — <declaration>)

- en dash: expresses a range (1–100)

- dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley)

I'd also like to see more concise philosophy around em v. ellipsis, "limerance" is poetic (and ironically antithetical to this "essay" … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is personal.

I offer this feedback as a humorously offended fan of all sidecar prose (dash, ellipsis, parens, quotes, and meta typographical treatments) pre-AI era.

Finally, I'd love to hear from this author regarding modern use of period in modern comunication, with canonical use-case of bulleted list as example.

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> - dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley)

That's a hyphen, and (to be pedantic) style guides usually do not consider it a dash.

There's also the 2-em dash in some style guides for redacting words, and since care needs to be taken to avoid a line wrap between the em dashes, Unicode has a character for it: ⸺

Finally,

> - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — <declaration>)

This use is sometimes discouraged by style guides, and in many cases, it can be replaced with a colon, comma, or semicolon.

In general, even before AI, the em dash is often considered overused.[0] My guess is that the em dash is perceived as sounding educated, so novice writers who learn about it end up using it recklessly, and LLMs could've picked up this habit from them.

[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...

The advantage of the em dash is that it can replace pretty much any other punctuation mark and work well enough. Quite often I'll be trying to remember whether to use a semicolon or a colon to connect two parts of a sentence, and then I decided I can't be bothered and just use a dash instead - it'll be fine.

I think this is the real reason for its (pre-LLM) ubiquity - it's a really flexible, versatile bit of punctuation, whereas most of its siblings have a more specific meaning or purpose.

The best advice is often: Use a dot and start a new sentence. The best writers use very short sentences in a row and simple words. They flow easily and do not break reading. This works particularly well in science and for difficult topics.

Most of the best writers today, and aesthetically the baseline expectation. But I personally like the older em dash and semicolon laden styles that used a greater diversity of forms to weave thoughts together.

A stream of short sentences often feels lazy, reductive, and tedious. But it is more forgiving--you can't fail if you don't try. And it inflates word count, similar to verbose Java vs compact Perl.

I find myself using semicolons excessively in my communication with LLMs. Those and nested parenthesis. I do this mostly to avoid having to restructure my words; my thought patterns are accurately reflected, and the machines have no trouble with lispish structure.

Some of the best writers, such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce, might disagree with short sentences.

There's also a triple m dash: ⸻.

Its only use is to make fun of LLMs.

Fun fact! Where a compound term is formed by joining two nouns of equal importance — such as Sarbanes–Oxley or attorney–client privilege — an en-dash, not a hyphen, should be used.

Apparently the first use of the hyphen disagrees:

> The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time, hyphenation was joining two pieces of text that might otherwise be read as two separate words by a low tie mark. This was necessary due to the ambiguity inherent in the lack of word spacing. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen

That’s the first use, and in another language to boot. Usage changes over time.

If I understand correctly, that wouldn’t change things: hyphens are used in English to link words (e.g., “work-product privilege” — the noun work modifies the noun product, and the two together modify the noun privilege) but two linked nouns of equal importance are a special case.

(Not my intent to be pedantic.)

This is not the best source (I’m pressed for time) but it gives a decent explanation: https://editorsmanual.com/articles/en-dash/#elements-of-equa...

I have never heard of this role and I'm not aware of anyone who follows it. The document you linked says that it's only used "in certain styles". So it sounds like a stylistic choice that an editor may choose to use or not, rather than a rule to be followed everywhere.

Fair enough. I first learned of it on law review in law school, from the Texas Law Review’s Manual of Style.

This is very common parlance in law

That seems to be the case with linguistic- and group practices in general. It's not universal law, and while the overlap of correctness and even best practice is pretty big, there are still differences. Subject matter, language, abstract institution (universities), concrete ditto (Oxford, Chalmers, Max Planck IoT, Royal Academy of {country}), register/style (daily newspaper, tabloid), etc.

That’s how we distinguish the Cox–Zucker Machine [1] from other Cox-Zucker Machines (scnr)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox–Zucker_machine

So, does it take a Cox–Zucker to know a Cox-Zucker, or vice versa?

At a Denny's once, I received a kid's menu with a blurb purporting to reveal the trendy new slang words kids were using. I read with interest, but found only contrived nonces like "sloovy." As a kid I could tell that this menu was fake news.

Ceasing the happy tradition of using the hyphen between equal-weighted nouns because of a hacker news comment is the moral equivalent of adopting expletives from the kids menu at a diner.

This isn't universal.

The New York Times Manual of Style, for instance, only permits using an en dash as a minus sign. Joining nouns like Sarbanes-Oxley and even number ranges use hyphens instead.

The BBC News Style Guide and the Economist Style Guide similarly use hyphens in place of en dashes - though sometimes BBC seems to use en dashes in place of em dashes.

The University of Cambridge Style Guide simply says to avoid dashes altogether.

The AMA Manual of Style explicitly declares that one should hyphenate two or more nouns of equal importance. They however continue to use the en dash when the first word in the compound modifies more than one word (e.g. anti–Norwalk virus).

The US General Printing Office Style Guide also uses hyphens, so the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is hyphenated in documents published by Congress.

The Chicago Manual of Style nearly got rid of the en dash as well, but backtracked after backlash.

Sounds like you'll appreciate my favorite related bit of typographic dash pedantry, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...

If you want to be official about things, use the en dash to replace a hyphen in compound adjectives when at least one of the elements is a two-word compound.

    the pre–Websterburg Bakery era

The thinking is that using a hyphen here, as in “the pre-Websterburg Bakery era,” risks the suggestion that pre attaches only to Websterburg. It’s unlikely, though, that a reader would truly be confused.

n.b. I don't know how to code an endash here. Would love to learn!

> I don't know how to code an endash here.

Just type it like normal – alt-hyphen on Macs, and I'm sure equivalent on other systems.

Funny thing is "normal" for me is either a double minus (--) for TeX or the HTML –

Furthermore, the conventions for the first (parenthetical) use case, as far as I understand, are either em-dash without spaces (Anglosphere convention), or en-dash with adjoining spaces (Continental convention: German, French, etc.), but rarely em-dash with spaces (as in the article).

> em-dash with spaces

my favourite (and I hope LLMs never converge to use it)

Isn't that what they predominantly use? I don't think I've ever seen an LLM use an em-dash without spaces. I've never seen an en-dash with spaces, but have seen them in ranges.

I checked a message from my last chat with Claude

> Noted for this conversation — though worth flagging

and that's an em-dash (unicode 0x2014)

A spaced en-dash is also commonly used in British english for the parenthesis equivalent. So it's not really "anglosphere".

While there's no central authority, both Oxford and Cambridge University press style guidelines recommend that.

Ah, interesting, so em-dash without spaces really is more of a US convention. My LLM pushed back against that assumption of mine :-)

> 5.2.1 Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens – to set off phrases."

– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

I have done this for years – it looks much better to me than an em dash – so it's nice to have some authority to cite!

Especially unspaced—this is just way too close—I can't even read it.

My favorite is the Chad Wittgenstein usage. — Where you add an em-dash after periods to slow down the reader. —— Sometimes a double em-dash to keep your reader on their toes.

Perhaps it's just me, but in my opinion, having not just two but three similar symbols is just bad design.

Before printing press became common, there was a time there were three punctuation marks[0]:

- dot

- dot but lower

- dot but higher

Very fortunately, that system got abandoned and we have comma and period now.

But then somehow, unfortunately, people invented a system where we have dash, dash but longer and dash but even shorter.

[0]: https://thejohnfox.com/2016/03/history-of-punctuation-signs/

Couldn't agree more. They are too visually similar in type, actually indistinguishable in handwriting without exaggeration, and our common digital text input methods were never designed to accommodate them.

As much as I consider these to be redundant and a waste of effort, I would genuinely be interested in a case being made for why they are good and useful to keep around.

Not to forget the chōonpu ー to mark elongated vowels in Japanese.

Konnichiwaー

I just know that MS-Word will replace a hyphen with an em dash in practical use, which is a big part of why I didn't really pick it out as an AI thing in general. Though AI, in particular Chat GPT, does tend to use a lot of them.

With HTML, I can do everything as a <div> and the eyeball reader doesn't know/care. Where it matters is that I'm stripping semantic meaning, which hurts computers and possible accessibility devices.

Most of my life, the same has been true about dashes. I use - for every one of the kinds you provided because - lives on my keyboard.

Is there real value in caring? Does it have the same semantic—stripping effect for computers/accessibility devices? The part of me wondering if I really should care is trying to suss out if this is a real problem or just an argument for semantics pedantics.

I can't think of any case where a human gets confused by some text because a hyphen character was used instead of an em-dash, and maybe that's what you mean by real value.

But I see you using an em-dash to hyphenate "semantic-stripping" as a joke, which is funny. Is that real value? Is conveying to others that you're educated real value?

Only when responding to rants, i.e. pedantry for fun. Live a little!

Yes, it matters. I found your comment hard to read and had to re-read it a couple of times to parse it. If you want to use the hyphen because it's more easily typed I suggest using the double hyphen "--", which perhaps doesn't have the correct semantics on a per-character basis, but at least looks mostly right and will be clear in meaning to a human reader.

The comment about your keyboard is ironic given the nerd forum we're in. The em and en dashes live on my keyboard alongside the hyphen because I'm a techie and I know how to put them there. My Android keyboard has them too and I didn't even need to put them there myself.

Butterick’s probably serves as the canonical online resource for that: https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

I’m surprised to see that you put spaces around the em dash in your example.

Know the rules, fight the rules, I guess. More readable, but I’ve since regressed as tooling comes into play. Maybe it’s a good way to still use ems and differentiate from AI.

Looks and readability matter in writing. I always uses spaces on either side of the em-dash; looks too crowded otherwise to my eye.

I've been doing doing it that way for so long I still often use the "--" construct from way back in ascii email days.

At least I've gotten past the two-spaces after a period I learned from the typewriter. Most of the time, anyway.

To me it doesn't affect readability either way, but to my American English eye the surrounding spaces stands out as extremely non-standard.

In LaTeX:

- A single hyphen designates ... a hyphen.

- A doubled hyphen designates an en dash.

- A tripled hyphen designates an em dash.

<https://ladedu.com/how-to-use-en-dash-and-em-dash-in-latex/>

(I'm not aware of longer dashes native to LaTeX, though I believe doubled en or em dashes are occasionally used.)

Many Markdown flavours incorporate this, such that en / em dash usage in Markdown-authored docs should not be entirely unexpected. I believe many LLMs output Markdown which is subsequently rendered, based on watching intermediate outputs and saved sessions. I tend to adopt LaTeX / Markdown semantics elsewhere.

DFW famously put spaces around his em dashes. That being said I've noticed at least one major model seems to have started putting spaces around its em dashes.

Every AI response I've seen that uses em dashes also includes spaces around them.

In many countries around the world, em dashes also express dialogue!

I grew up reading novels and plays

Inspector Lestrade and Holmes were speaking:

— What’s up?

— Not much

— Cool.

em dashes are also sometimes used to express interruption in dialog.

"I was thinking—"

"Well, there's your first mistake"

Typographically speaking, it's really a separate kind of dash, a tad bit longer than an en dash. Nowadays it's more often set as an en dash, the em dash is a bit old fashioned for dialogue. But probably this differs between countries.

I still don't see the actual point, as the meaning of the dash is already clear from the context around them. The em dash is surrounded by spaces, the en dash is surrounded by numbers, and the hyphen is used in compound words. A single character, the one that already exists on my keyboard, works fine for all three.

Which one is the minus symbol?

None, it is a separate character/code point and is notable for aligning with the + and having the same width.

U+2212: −

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2212

> meta typographical treatments

Do you expect anyone to know what this means?

which one of those is a hyphen?

Hyphen: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2010

But there's also hyphen-minus: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+002D, and a search for 'hyphen' returns a bunch of others: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=hyphen.

em dash is awesome. I immediately know I am talking to a bot.

That's one way to telling us you don't read professional writing without telling us you don't read professional writing.

Where do you think the bots learned it from?

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