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 3

Philadelphia 9/15/2025|

We were taught to use em dashes as reporters 25 years ago, and I use them all the time in personal writing.

foxyv 9/15/2025||

The only time I used the em dash was when Microsoft word used to automatically add it to something I was typing. Usually it was formally typed stuff like essays and reports. I have never in my life used an em dash for anything else. Usually just a hyphen "-" at most.

daveslash 9/16/2025|

Came here to say the same thing. Folks have been saying for a while "it's a tell tale sign of AI!" and I've been thinking - have people forgotten about Microsoft Word (and other word processors) automatically changing a hyphen to an em-dash?

gizajob 9/16/2025||

Human writers with university degrees and who conform to the style guides where they’re free to use it.

Newspapers generally avoid it, even avoiding it completely in favour of commas. Properly wielding the n-dash or the m-dash requires training.

yung_steezy 9/16/2025||

I use the em-dash quite often but tend to forget that I need to hit `-` twice to get it to appear in markdown. Used to be an oversight on my part but now I stick to it so people can tell I'm personally writing to them.

teekert 9/15/2025||

If you see text from me and it has an em-dash, it's 100% gen AI.

jml78 9/15/2025||

Yep, I am 46 and never knew the name of it until AI . Never used them

brookst 9/15/2025|||

Anyone working on HTML 20 years ago was very familiar with — as a layout/typography tool. I think I used them before that but learned the name from typing it so much.

JKCalhoun 9/15/2025||||

Maybe the only cool thing to come out of this kooky obsession then: people are learning more about the wider world of punctuation.

I just thought it was cool when I learned that there were glyphs with names that indicated how wide they were.

And I believe the letter "x" is the standard for determining font height? Someone can correct me.

fortyseven 9/15/2025|||

I'm 49 and they're my bread and butter. Em-dashes Army unite!!

ynniv 9/15/2025||

surrounded by spaces... right?

JKCalhoun 9/15/2025|||

Yeah, I do that. Maybe it's a reaction to badly kerned fonts I've encountered or maybe I just didn't notice the words were more or less joined by the em-dash. I guess I've been treating it as a long hyphen all this time.

kzhe 9/15/2025|||

Only after, not before.

commandlinefan 9/15/2025||

I never gave it much thought until I published my first book - then the editor insisted that I replace most of my parenthetical thoughts with emdash'ed inserts instead.

musicale 9/16/2025||

That's just the sort of thing an LLM would say.

globular-toast 9/16/2025||

I used em dash liberally in my PhD thesis, mainly because I learnt how to do them in TeX. Thankfully that was a long time before LLMs.

mcv 9/15/2025||

It seems to me that the article is missing the point somewhat. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the em-dash, but most people never use it (I don't think I've ever used it), because it doesn't appear on most standard keyboards.

If you encounter an em-dash in an online discussion, most likely someone went to extra effort to include it, or it was automatically inserted, possibly by an AI.

There are other signs that you're looking at AI-generated texts, like lists of three, a certain turn of phrase, or vague generalities, but those are easier for a human to type than an em-dash.

coffeefirst 9/15/2025||

Arguably there are two types of emdash users: robots, and bookworms with English or journalism degrees who actually had to learn to use oddball punctuation in the typographically correct way.

Shift option dash.

caconym_ 9/16/2025||

I went to the "extra effort" of learning the (trivial) Mac keystroke to insert an emdash, probably about 10 years ago. Now I use it so often and so easily that I can't even recall which keys it is---it's pure muscle memory. (that three hyphens thing there is translated into an emdash by Pandoc, so it has become my go-to when I'm not typing on a Mac)

I expect most people who use emdashes in casual writing are people who have done a lot of reading and a substantial amount of writing too (professionally or otherwise), who are also tech-savvy enough to understand that it's possible to easily insert symbols that aren't printed on the keys of your keyboard. These are the people you're filtering out when you decide to use emdashes as your primary signal for deciding whether text was written by AI or not, and I think that's pretty stupid. In your haste to avoid content written by AIs you're filtering content written by people who care about writing, which leaves content written by people who don't, and content written by genAI systems told not to use emdashes, which you will naturally be far less suspicious of because you're fixated on the emdash thing.

I generally think it's terrible that genAI slop is displacing human writing, however useful I might LLMs for other tasks. In that, I probably agree with a lot of the people using emdashes as a negative signal. But the fact is that this widespread attitude toward emdashes can only accelerate that displacement, by tarring high quality human writing as suspicious while giving cleverly manipulated LLM output a pass.

Hilift 9/15/2025|

"Point to the keys you press to enter the em dash". And smart quotes. My conjecture (and personal experience) is 99% of the occurrences of these characters is not due to pressing they corresponding keys, it is due to copy paste. So it should not be surprising or considered to be a personal attack on AI.

lapcat 9/15/2025||

FYI on a Mac, option - is an en dash, shift option - is an em dash.

Smart quotes are trickier, because the shortcuts are unfortunately unintuitive IMO. I forget what the original ones are, but they involve the [ and ] keys. I've actually remapped them using Karabiner-Elements so that option [ and ] are single quotes and shift option [ and ] double quotes.

kps 9/15/2025||

Apple botched the quotes by putting ‘’ on [ and “” on ], rather than the open quotes on the open bracket and the close quotes on the close bracket.

(Personally I put the open quotes on ` and the close quotes on ', along with using Apple-style dash layout.)

zik 9/15/2025|||

In most word processing software you just type "--", or "--- " to get an em-dash. It's not rocket science.

LukeShu 9/15/2025|||

Apple users (both macOS and iOS) get curly quotes by default when they hit quote key.

dansmith1919 9/15/2025||

They also get the em dash when typing '--'

gtk40 9/15/2025|||

Many devices and word processors will convert "--" into an em-dash. On longer posts, I often write in a word processor and then copy-paste to a text field.

On Android and iOS, you press and hold the "-" to get the "–" and "—" options.

On Mac, use opt + hyphen for "–" and opt + shift + hyphen for "—" (similar to other special characters).

On Linux you can enable the compose key and use it similar to MacOS (Compose+---).

It's not rocket science.

halosghost 9/16/2025|||

From `/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose`:

    ...
    <Multi_key> <less> <apostrophe>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <less>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <apostrophe>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <greater>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <less> <quotedbl>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <less>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <quotedbl>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <greater>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    ...
    <Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "—"   U2014 # EM DASH
    ...

I genuinely do not understand how compose-lacking ɪᴍᴇs continue to see use—so much more of the full unicode spec is trivially available to you… even quite intuitively.

All the best,

-HG

kzhe 9/15/2025|||

I set up espanso to replace -= with the em dash when I type because I like its aesthetic. I used to use the compose key, and on Windows I'd had an AHK shortcut for it. On Android GBoard has the em dash as an option which long pressing on the dash, while FUTO makes it available just from the letter g.

huflungdung 9/15/2025||

[dead]

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