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 4

pessimizer 9/15/2025|

I have no idea how this is a real article that people are wasting their time on.

Of course people use the em-dash, and of course LLMs use them at least 10x-100x more than your average human writer. Also, they add nothing to writing, 99.8% people just use an en-dash when typing where an em-dash would be used in print, and absolutely nothing is lost. Some dickheads (like myself) have used a compose key (or similar) to use actual em-dashes in order to seem sophisticated online.

The only people who need the em-dash, as far as I know, are Spanish-language writers. As for LLM-shaming, isn't it more shameful when you publish an article that could easily be entirely written by LLM, but definitely wasn't, like this one?

edit: articles like this make me want to misuse flagging.

blooalien 9/16/2025|

> "(like me) ... in order to seem sophisticated online."

Or like me, because they grew up in a different location, era, or career path where proper typography, spelling, grammar, and punctuation matter more than it does for most (print, web dev, advertising, etc) and now the use of that compose-key is just pure muscle-memory like high-speed "touch typing" is.

wavemode 9/15/2025||

This article is attacking a strawman. Nobody was ever advocating for labeling all em dash usage as AI. Even the tweet they reference (not that random tweets ought to be taken as some sort of authoritative gauge of the current state of society...) does not claim that all em dash usage is AI.

In certain contexts, em dashes are perfectly natural and human. That being said, everyone has encountered articles and posts that read so obviously like AI, and in those contexts the presence of numerous em dashes is certainly an additional data point.

Nevermark 9/16/2025||

I use the em⸻dash.

CivBase 9/15/2025||

This article completely misses the point from the start.

The reason em dashes are a giveaway for AI generated text is simply because there is no em dash key on the keyboard - only an en dash key. The dash I used in that last sentence was an en dash, not an em dash.

Some publishing applications (including Microsoft Word) will automatically convert en dashes to em dashes where appropriate. But most email apps, chat apps, online posts/comments, and practically any application not designed for writing actual printed publications will not do that conversion for you. And without a dedicated key, it is far too cumbersome for most people to bother. They will just leave it as an en dash.

So yes, the em dash is still a reliable indicator of AI-generated content in many contexts.

orev 9/15/2025||

The keyboard key is usually a hyphen, not an en-dash.

But I agree that because LLMs are trained on public documents, and most of those are written in Microsoft Word which has auto-format enabled by default, that is probably the source of so many LLMs using them.

Almost nobody, relatively speaking, even knows they exist, let alone goes out of their way to figure out the ALT code combination to use them. Most people can’t get their, they’re, and there right.

CivBase 9/15/2025||

> The keyboard key is usually a hyphen, not an en-dash.

You are right. Thanks for catching that.

kzhe 9/15/2025|||

No, its a hyphen you used. - vs – vs — (hyphen, en, em). Most android keyboards make typing the em dash easy, and there are plenty of ways to set it up on desktop

brookst 9/15/2025||

Mobile device keyboards typically make it easy to type — by holding down - for a moment.

phyzome 9/15/2025||

It's so stupid that this even needs to be said.

And yet here we ware.

tolmasky 9/15/2025|

I'm glad the em dash is getting properly shit on these days, if for unrelated reasons. I've never liked it. I hate the stupid spacing rules around it. It never looks right to put no spaces around the em dash, and probably breaks all sorts of word-splitting code that's based on "\s". Where else does punctuation without spaces not mean a single word? Hyphens without spaces is a compound word: it counts as one. Imagine if the correct use of a colon was to not put spaces around it:like this. Do you like that? Of course not.

But I think worst of all it just gives me the fucking creeps, some uncanny-valley bullshit. I see hyphens a million times a day then out of nowhere comes this creepy slender-man looking motherfucker that's just a little bit too long than you'd expect or like, and is always touching all the letters around it when it shouldn't need to. It stands out looking like a weird print error... on my screen! Hopefully it keeps building a worse and worse reputation.