em dashes are typographical faffery and have always been (in my opinion) a marker of writers who take themselves, and the surface level of their style, far too serious.
Semicolons should separate related ideas; they should work as independent sentences though.
Em dashes–contrary to how most people use them–are for asides or supplementary information. I also see them used to show a conclusion–a direct response to a prior statement that doesn’t seem appropriate to put in a new sentence.
Teaching myself to stop using the em dash has been a real pain. It helps with the flow of reading particularly when talking about technical content. I’ve gone back to the semicolon, sadly.
also me when people accuse me of being ai slop for using em dashes just because big tech trained their models by stealing authors work.
There was a comment that was a list of 15 items and some chud called it AI slop. Because it was an organized list?
em dashes are typographical faffery and have always been (in my opinion) a marker of writers who take themselves, and the surface level of their style, far too serious.
just use commas, my friend
em dashes, en dashes, and commas have different meanings and uses
aren’t all of them “do a short pause”?
Just use commas, my friend
vs.
Just use commas – my friend
It doesn’t work very well.
dashes cannot always replace commas, but commas can replace dashes.
thus - commas are more powerful
thus, commas are more powerful
Amusingly enough, one use case for em dashes is a pause where a comma would be too weak — refuting your assertion.
Also, you used a hyphen.
not actually a hyphen, a minus (not that this matters to me in the slightest)
I’m sorry, but “the pause is too weak” sounds squarely in the area of faffery to me.
I like to use em, but I’m too lazy to tye them so I just use two regular dashes (–) which I guess I haven’t seen an LLM do yet.
Its actually wild to me that people who use LLMs don’t edit the output to make it look like it was not generated.
For me, the greatest giveaways are the emojis and bad formatting.
iOS automatically converts two endashes into an emdash for whatever that’s worth
just swap them out with semicolons; no one knows how they’re supposed to work anyway
Semicolons should separate related ideas; they should work as independent sentences though.
Em dashes–contrary to how most people use them–are for asides or supplementary information. I also see them used to show a conclusion–a direct response to a prior statement that doesn’t seem appropriate to put in a new sentence.
Best choice is to switch out the em dashes for parentheses ( even where that doesn’t make any sense.
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semicolons have commas included, friend.
sorry, replied to the wrong comment
Teaching myself to stop using the em dash has been a real pain. It helps with the flow of reading particularly when talking about technical content. I’ve gone back to the semicolon, sadly.