Human writers have always used the em dash

Posted by FromTheArchives 9/12/2025

Human writers have always used the em dash(www.theringer.com)

129 points | 146 commentspage 2

podgorniy 9/15/2025|

In 2008-ish I was into web typography for if you may say so. We used to use special tools like https://www.artlebedev.ru/typograf/ to make text appear clear according to typography ideas. That included m-dashes. Amazing to see this subject surfacing again.

dcchambers 9/15/2025||

I am a millennial and I grew up with computers. I was taught that it was grammatically proper to use dashes, not hyphens. Microsoft Word (and later, Google Docs) made this trivially easy because you could type two hyphens (--) and it would replace it with an em-dash character. I rarely write in Word or Google Docs these days, but when I do I still do that double-hyphen shortcut.

I think the main reason people are noticing it now is because most writing has moved away from legacy tools like Word. Websites like Twitter don't do that character substitution, so it has become quite obvious when text is being pasted from another place...for example, AI generated content.

1970-01-01 9/15/2025||

Humans also have great grammar, spelling and punctuate they're sentences corectally

serbuvlad 9/15/2025||

Yes, people use the em dash. The point isn't the em dash itself. It's about U+2014. Yeah, in a book, or maybe a quality article, you'd type the em dash properly. But most of the time online? I write it as - or as --.

kzhe 9/15/2025||

but that looks worse, it's horrible.

i have espanso set up to quick replace "-=" with — on desktop and on my phone i use futo keyboard, which has the aesthetically inspring em dash one hold and swipe on the h key away.

JimDabell 9/15/2025|||

When you type -- on iOS or macOS it gets auto-converted to U+2014.

serbuvlad 9/15/2025||

Wow, that's pretty cool. I've never used an Apple product, so I had no idea.

Philadelphia 9/17/2025||

On iOS, you can also hold down the hyphen and get a popup menu with an em dash option (along with en dash and a bullet). On Macs, you can get an em dash with option-shift-hyphen.

anon7000 9/15/2025||

iOS, and probably plenty of other operating systems, converts that into dash automatically by default. 2x “-“ > “—“

So that’s just a bad signal

currency 9/15/2025||

I use em dashes constantly.

I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).

F-W-M 9/15/2025|

I have all of it on my keyboard: neo-layout.org

cainxinth 9/15/2025||

LLMs have also made the word “crucial” suspect. They use that one constantly.

jb1991 9/15/2025|

Personally, I’m very suspicious of any post that ends with “this was automatically generated by ChatGPT.“ Whenever I see this phrase, it strongly suggests it was written with AI.

dansmith1919 9/15/2025||

That's why I still finish everything I write with "Sent from my iPhone 4 using Tapatalk" — just to reinforce that there's a human behind it.

Sent from my iPhone 4 using Tapatalk

SkyeCA 9/15/2025||

Normal people (myself included) are not particularly good at writing and would never use an emdash. The average person won't even use semicolons because of confusion about how to use them and at least those have a dedicated key.

I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.

BHSPitMonkey 9/15/2025||

Then you're throwing out a lot of babies with your bathwater: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

I'm not prolific enough to rank on this leaderboard, but I often use the em dash in comments/posts/texts and have for years—especially on my phone, since it's easiest to reach from a mobile keyboard.

spoiler 9/15/2025|||

I grew up ob forums where em-dashes and semicolons were fairly common—Harry Potter roleplay forums! In fact, that's how I learned most of my English; probably where some of my expression style developed.

Em-dashes are a great way to signal something—thought or extra context—were inject into normal sentences flow. It can make the text appear more conversational

I realise Harry Potter roleplaying forums are not really your "normal" crowd though lol

gtk40 9/15/2025|||

Honestly em-dashes are simpler to use than other punctuation and sometimes come in handy when it's not clear what to use.

moralestapia 9/15/2025|||

Why are they not in widespread use, though?

AACK!

andreareina 9/15/2025|||

Because parentheticals—as aside, explanation, enumeration—aren't taught and we are left to learn them by example, and not many people care enough about writing style to pick up on them and want to use them. Ask most people who don't deal with technical writing about the Oxford comma and they likely won't care, if they know what it is in the first place.

gtk40 9/15/2025|||

I will admit I'm more like to use "--" and not bother converting it if not done automatically on quick forum posts. You can find examples in my post history. But I come across them all the time in written works.

brookst 9/15/2025|||

Many of us who use em-dashes are so used to Word/etc correcting -- to — that it's just part of normal typing. I'm find if it renders either way, but I use -- in writing all the time.

One day this whole thing is going to read like the 1980's where you could tell if a latter was written by a "real" typist and not a word processor by the lack of correction liquid/tape.

anon7000 9/15/2025|||

But this is the problem, if you type double “-“ on iOS, it just turns it into an emdash. (“—“)

Terretta 9/15/2025|||

Honestly — starting with the word honestly also seems like an LLM tell.

BeetleB 9/15/2025||

> I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.

All of this is distracting from the real question, which is:

Why do you care if it was AI generated?

As long as my comment reflects what I intended to say, you shouldn't care if I wrote it or the AI wrote it. Did it offend you in the past if an HN commenter used Grammarly to help craft the comment?

This is the literary equivalent of an ad hominem attach.

pertymcpert 9/15/2025||

Because many people use LLMs to generate the thoughts and not just to tidy up grammar. And they don’t critically think about it.

khernandezrt 9/15/2025||

I’ve never used an em dash in my life—but after having AI rewrite a lot of my emails I’m starting to use it more often, though incorrectly most of the time.

Doctor_Fegg 9/15/2025||

Fixed that for you: _American_ writers have always used the em dash. In British English orthography, space-en dash-space is much more common.

uncircle 9/15/2025||

I've recently enjoyed the German philosopher Max Stirner's liberal usage of em-dashes to add, at the end of his sentences — great emphasis.

> Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my — conscience.

---

In any case, the "en-dash", as you seem to suggest, is not equivalent to the "em-dash", but typically used to express ranges or contrast between two words, i.e. "1990–1992" or "push–pull configuration".

tcldr 9/15/2025|||

No.

In Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic style – pretty much a bible amongst typographers – he states:

We should “[u]se spaced en dashes – rather than close-set em dashes or spaced hyphens – to set off phrases.” Bringhurst then adds this devastating indictment:

The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.

uncircle 9/15/2025||

I have no excuse: I read that book, and I thought I was quoting his advice from memory.

robin_reala 9/15/2025|||

…in en-US. In en-GB, the en-dash surrounded by normal spaces, as per GP, is used where the US would use an em-dash flanked with hair spaces.

Edit: I dug out the original text of your translated phrase to see if it was Stirner’s or the translator’s use of em-dashes, and it looks like it was direct from Stirner: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_sQ5RAAAAcAAJ_2/page/n89/m...

gadders 9/15/2025|||

I break sentences up with a " - " all the time, just by using the minus sign (hyphen). I'm not bothering to use the correct, slightly longer dash. I'm British English speaker.

ToDougie 9/15/2025||

Ditto. Learned how to effectively use it in college - I'll never stop!

giveita 9/15/2025|||

space – en-dash – space?

orphea 9/15/2025||

  > Fixed that for you: _American_ writers

Reverting the fix. Em dashes are not exclusive to Americans (or English at all), they are used in other languages.

philipwhiuk 9/15/2025||

PR rejected, please add sufficient examples as unit tests to ensure we hit our code coverage.

FireBeyond 9/12/2025|

I use the em dash as appropriate, similar to semicolons and their ilk.

I don't think use of an em dash is indicative in itself of AI assistance, but rather, the change to using them. Did this person all of a sudden start using them? There are also other things to look at, like how certain bullet point lists have emphasis (for key phrases, being bold, when previously the author didn't do so, stylistically).

I write a lot (as a PM) - I've taken to using MacWhisper, which does local AI dictation, but also (at my configuration) sends it to a ChatGPT prompt first:

"You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to refine and polish the given transcript as follows:

1. Correct any spelling errors.

2. Fix grammatical mistakes.

3. Improve punctuation where necessary.

4. Ensure consistent formatting.

5. Clarify ambiguous phrasing without changing the meaning.

6. If a sentence or paragraph is overly verbose and has more than negligible redundancy, lightly edit for brevity.

7. If the transcript contains a question, edit it for clarity but do not provide an answer.

Please return only the cleaned-up version of the transcript. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edits."

This is great. I get the benefits of pretty accurate transcription while getting a first pass at copyediting almost in real time. It did require me to make some tweaks to my dictation process (allowing it to "chew" on larger chunks to give better context to its editing), but it works very well.

bee_rider 9/15/2025|

I don’t think a change to using them is really all that strong of a signal, either. All the furor over using em-dashes as an AI detector might have gotten some folks to start using them.

I’m sort of surprised they haven’t always been widespread. They are great for making asides without losing energy-the voice in my head somehow has the same volume after an em-dash (unlike parentheses, which are quieter).

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