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What is the typical motivation to start using em-dashes? Why go the extra way to have a slightly elongated dash when a normal one would just as well do the job
by theK 3mo ago
What is the typical motivation to start using em-dashes?
Why go the extra way to have a slightly elongated dash when a normal one would just as well do the job?
I might be conpletely off here but I've never seen a situation where using a normal dash where a long one should be causes any sort of syntactic trouble.
- Macha 3mo agoIt looks aesthetically nicer. It was also a bit of a signal that someone took pride in their work and so helped that way. It's a bit like whether your tradesperson cleans up after themselves. Technically sweeping up the dust after installing a kitchen cabinet doesn't actually mean anything for the quality of the kitchen cabinet installation, but in practice putting the effort into the presentation correlates with putting the effort into the actual work.
- theK 3mo agoI understand the sentiment with the tradesman example. I would argue that there are a multitude of ways to care about or take pride in one's trade and emdashing the floor is just one of them.
- derwiki 3mo agoAn emdash means something different than shorter dashes https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
- fragmede 3mo agoi mean why use punctuation or any capitals at all, why not just blast words out in a stream of consciousness so readers know how yr thinking why even bother with speeling things write Just because you don't care to use the proper dash doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. People have different levels of caring about different details. For the sticklers, there's even a special code point for ellipsis, … rather than .... (Four being correct, as one is to end the sentence.) Personally I'll just skip — entirely unless I'm in a trolling mood, though “sometimes” the right quotes are worth using. Special characters are easy to type on a phone soft keyboard, taking a long press on the relevant key, or if you're using any other advanced input system, so they shouldn't really be considered to be the mark of LLM input. The real trouble is that people doing engage with the substance of the post anymore, and just shallowly dismiss a post as being vibe written, as if that makes any points raised invalid. Anti-intellectualism's always been cool among a certain crowd. Shame to see it spread but ah well, the propaganda's working.
- hamburglar 3mo agoI think people who care about correctness and also read a lot automatically see the difference and it seems (and is) technically incorrect to use a hyphen where an em dash belongs. That’s really it. Kind of like you wouldn’t just leave out the apostrophes in your writing even though in most contexts they are not strictly necessary for comprehension.
- theK 3mo agoLeaving out apostrophes isn't the same though, is it? If you leave out apostrophes you have syntactic effects while a (sortof)dash is still sort of a dash?
- hamburglar 3mo agoIts not exactly the same, of course, but its pretty analogous. It’s a minor, technically incorrect change that doesnt change meaning or understandability most of the time. Ive left out a bunch of apostrophes in this paragraph and Im pretty sure nobody will have a hard time understanding any of it. Yet it would bug me to actually write like this.
- theK 3mo agoI don't know how this works nowadays but when I got taught to write (the pencil and paper kind) and specifically when I got taught syntax, it was "if you want to introduce a clause that explains or expands upon something that precedes it, you draw a small horizontal line" no mention of special chars, Unicode or whatsoever. So why is it so special other than being authors fancy?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- codedokode 3mo agoBecause ASCII minus instead of dash looks ugly. It's like using zero instead of "o".