How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
470 comments
·March 27, 2025mmooss
lxgr
> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts
Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes.
For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which makes using the dictionary very annoying.
krick
It's actually only your post that made me realize people don't normally put spaces around em dash. In French, Russian and a bunch of other languages proper typesetting is to use em dash as a standard dash character, and you always put spaces around them. So I did it in English as well, for many years now.
(I also now looked up and found out that in Spanish, apparently, you are supposed to put space only on one side of the dash, when used as a direct speech separator.)
rmunn
I also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.
snozolli
people don't normally put spaces around em dash
For what it's worth, I was in the last class in my high school to learn typing on IBM Selectric typewriters. We were taught to type two spaces, two hyphens, then two spaces. Incidentally, we were taught two spaces after periods and colons. To this day, I find it hard to read text that doesn't have proper spacing after periods. (HTML and WYSIWYG word processors handle formatting, but e.g. fixed-font text editors don't)
mmooss
What is a "standard dash character"? There is no such thing in English; only hyphen, EN dash, EM dash (and some odds and ends).
rahimnathwani
I grew up in the UK, and have always used space, minus, space.
The first keyboard I used was my dad's typewriter, and I don't recall it having any 'dash' other that the minus sign.
Propelloni
I was under the impression that you do "-" for hyphen, "--" for En dash, and "---" for Em dash. IIRC, LaTeX (or maybe the editor, it has been some time) even helpfully changes that for you to the correct dash.
Finnucane
British typesetting style is a little different from US style in the way dashes are presented. In the UK, you might see a thin-space--en-dash---thin-space where a US typesetter would use a em-dash. Typewriter style generally follows books style. Since typesetters no longer use an extra space after punctuation, it's vestigial in typing.
robin_reala
en-US style is a single em-dash. en-GB style is a single en-dash with spaces on either side.
KPGv2
space, minus, space is on the same level as manually typing two spaces after a period
opello
> Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this
The last paragraph of the article also addressed the subjective nature of spacing around the em dash:
> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
As far as the selection detail, did you mean that you replace an em dash used like a comma or parenthesis with spaces and an en dash for specific highlight performance issues? Surely the spaces and an em dash would alleviate the selection highlight behavior and not muddy the waters of when to use an em vs. an en dash?
JadeNB
> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
It's funny that they omit to mention the possibility of setting it off with a thin space ' ' or hair space ' ' (those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me), which I thought was preferred typographic practice.
(On Googling, maybe the reason that they don't mention it is that I was imagining it; I can't find any evidence for my belief.)
mmooss
The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism at least, says
<word> <space> <dash> <space> <word>
<word> <dash> <word>
lxgr
> <word> <dash> <word>
That one I’d usually parse as a hyphen, as in e.g. well-known. “Word space dash space word” is much clearer, in my view.
> The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism
One of the things I can easily get away with by not being a US journalist :)
mattl
Chicago Manual of Style has no spaces, so there’s some variation at least.
cyrillite
I have been doing this for purely aesthetic reasons my whole life. Style guides be damned, I hate connected em dashes.
lxgr
The good thing about style guides is that they’re guides, not laws :)
That’s one thing I really like about English: There’s no central authority decreeing what’s right and what’s wrong top down, and it feels like there is some room for individual preferences and experimentation.
Very refreshing, compared to e.g. German, which has more than one semi-official authority gate keeping “correctness” in speech and writing.
null
KPGv2
> Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this
Which one does that? I threw up a little in my mouth and wish to avoid such style guides in the future!
lxgr
Better avoid British journalism then, and many other languages on top of that.
It’s very common outside of America, even in English.
BoumTAC
I'm not a native English speaker, but don't you use the ";" in English ?
To me, it feels like it is the same purpose as the EM dashes.
And I discovered the EM with ChatGPT, I've never seen it before.
layer8
A semicolon connects, whereas an em-dash creates more of a pause and therefore separates. In addition, em-dashes can be used in pairs to create a parenthesis, which semicolons can’t. I think with time you will appreciate the difference.
https://thenarrativearc.org/blog/2020/2/4/epic-grammar-battl...
OJFord
Dashes surround a sub-clause - something like this - which is like a parenthetical addition to a sentence that could stand alone without it; semi-colons (';') connect a further sentence or part of one where perhaps a full-stop and additional word could have been. They also sometimes separate list items following a colon, especially if the things listed are longer sentences perhaps themselves containing commas that'd otherwise be ambiguous.
grey413
Em dashes are very similar to semicolons. You use em dashes if your related sentence is in the middle of another sentence, and semicolons if it's at the end.
They're frequently used in skilled and professional grade writing.
mmooss
So as not to mislead anyone, the parent is mostly incorrect:
Here's an example sentence: Semicolons must have independent clauses—phrases that could form a full sentence on their own—on both sides of them; they are essentially alternatives for periods. Em dashes don't require independent clauses on either side.
In the italicized sentence,
* phrases that could form a full sentence on their own is not an independent clause but is valid between em dashes. on both sides of them, after the em dashes, is also not an independent clause. (The em dashes function like commas or parentheses here.)
* The parts before and after the semicolon are independent clauses. You could replace the semicolon with a period and you'd have perfectly valid grammar. I just chose to connect the two sentences a bit more.
I don't know if you can use em dashes as the parent comment describes, connecting three independent clauses:
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet—I eat them all summer.
I think the above is wrong; it should be one of the following:
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet—and I eat them all summer.: The last section is a dependent clause made by "and", not an independent clause.
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet; I eat them all summer.: One both sides of the semicolon are independent clauses; I could replace the semicolon with a period.
Maybe there are examples I'm not thinking of? I infer that the rule might be that the punctution following the em-dashed clauses should be the punctuation that would have been used without the em-dashed clause, but that's based on very limited evidence.
mmooss
Many people don't use semicolons (;) in English but many do, and they are certainly part of correct grammar.
Semicolons are generally alternatives to periods, when you want more connection between the two sentences. Like periods, semicolons must have two full sentences—that is, what could be full sentences—on either side of them; the potential 'full sentences' are properly called independent clauses. (A dependent clause needs the rest of the sentence to form valid grammar; it can't function on its own. For example, in this paragraph's first sentence, when you want more connection between the two sentences is a dependent clause. Often they follow commas.)
Another use of semicolons is for lists in a paragraph where one of the list items has a comma in it (similar to the parsing problem for CSVs where some records contain commas): I only like wine; beer, but only ales; and orange juice.
dspillett
> Unicode has the original ASCII hyphen-minus (U+002d), as well as a dedicated hyphen (U+2010), other functional hyphens…
Which can be fun when parsing CSV files from various sources. I've hit numbers with U2010 or others where you would expect a hyphen-minus should be. Presumably someone² has copied a negative number from a document where one of the alternate symbols was used, and pasted it into everyone's favourite data-mangler¹ which interpreted it as a string, and so on down the chain.
--------
[1] Excel. Sometimes a joy, sometimes the bane of my existence.
[2] It is surprising, horrifying even, how much manual manipulation of data goes on in banking, where you might naturally assume everything is more automated these days. Sometimes a laborious manual process done regularly is seen as cheaper than paying for it to be automated…
divbzero
I prefer the dedicated minus (U+2212) over the hyphen-minus (U+002d) for mathematical use because they look different in most font faces.
Are there cases where the dedicated hyphen (U+2010) is preferred over the hyphen-minus?
LegionMammal978
G. Brandon Robinson swears by U+2010 for hyphens in groff's Unicode output [0], but I see it as a hypercorrection. The most common convention by far (among authors who use Unicode and care about dashes) is to use U+002D for hyphens and U+2212 for minus signs. Not even the Unicode Consortium uses U+2010 for hyphens in its documents, and I'm not aware of any major organization that does.
As far as appearance goes, almost all fonts I've looked at make U+2010 identical to U+002D (i.e., they don't put any 'minus' into the 'hyphen-minus'), but a few make U+2010 a smidgeon shorter.
mmooss
Edit: G. Branden Robinson (note spelling) is the maintainer of groff.
wruza
Intl.NumberFormat also prefers it, but then you can't paste negative numbers into most financial software, calculators, spreadsheets. Even back into inputs on the same webpage, if it does custom number parsing. Even though <input type=number> accepts U+2212 as a minus, it turns it into a regular minus when you spin it down to -2.
It looks much better though and more visible: −1 vs -1. I wish hyphen was a separate symbol from the ascii start, or that monospace fonts didn't tend to shorten "-" cause it makes little sense in monospace anyway.
layer8
It has two potential benefits:
— In the context of automatic text processing, it unambiguously indicates the function of a hyphen, as opposed to a minus
— Fonts can choose to make the hyphen-minus a bit wider than a regular hyphen, to accommodate the usage as a minus sign. In that case, U+2010 would be typographically more appropriate for a hyphen, similar to how U+2212 usually is typographically more appropriate for a minus sign.
zajio1am
Visual style of hyphen-minus depends on font. Some fonts displays it more like a minus, others like a hyphen. So if you care about distinguishing hyphen and minus, it makes sense to use dedicated hyphen and minus, and do not use hyphen-minus at all.
mproud
A regular hyphen arguably looks better when used as a hyphen and not a minus.
docmars
EN dashes are also great for date ranges: 1/1/2025–3/28/2025
energy123
The em dash is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is the output of a LLM.
sho_hn
My advise is to take pleasure and have confidence in good writing, over misspent energy worrying about things like this.
If you practice your skills, you will reap the rewards.
alt187
The letter 'm' is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is the output of a LLM.
xanderlewis
No, thanks—I’ll keep using them as I always have.
mmooss
Someone else said the same. How can that be when most word processors, and at least some phone keyboards, automatically insert em dashes?
grey413
It's infuriating that people are drawing this conclusion. LLMs pick up on em dash usage because professional and skilled writers use em dashes. They're a consistently useful, if niche, part of the literary toolkit.
But, no, now it's a problem because the majority of people's experience with writing is graded essays. And because LLMs emulate professionals, it's now a red flag if students write too much like professionals. What a joke.
phlakaton
Emily Dickinson wept—
mmooss
Ha, good point, and an interesting question: What kinds of dashes did Dickinson intend?
It's a hard one to answer: We could look at published Emily Dickinson books from the time, but did Dickinson really pay that close attention to or have that much control over the type?
We could look at Dickinson's actual personal documents, but if they were handewritten, distinguishing dashes could be difficult even if there was intention there.
lostlogin
I had a quick search, attempting to find a great author who hated em dashes and preferred the vastly superior en dash. I found nothing.
This list of authors punctuation quirks is interesting though.
https://lithub.com/the-punctuation-marks-loved-and-hated-by-...
nkotov
Recently ran into this. Didn't realize it was that obvious.
windward
And you'd better not 'delve' into anything
raverbashing
You are right of course
However this is the kind of rule that "existed" for a while and most likely will go away as most people can't be bothered with the difference and it all looks similar anyway
Or maybe who knows, it will keep going on because chatgpt knows it
econ
I've always wanted an array or object with range keys like: arr[0–2] = 123; if(arr[1.5555]>122){}
yesbabyyes
That doesn't seem to be an array at all, if the idea is to check whether a number is within a range. Seems like an interesting data type though, a combination of a range data type and a map/associative array.
econ
I was thinking of a sparse array but any name will do. obj[~42] ?
One may have a bunch of key ranges each associated with a value or one may have a key that should be "rounded" to the nearest key or retreave the one below or above it.
It feels like something basic enough to have in a language and I found it oddly complicated to write myself. Comparing it with all values doesn't seem like a very good solution.
Not that I know many languages.
null
A_D_E_P_T
AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: --
Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.
BalinKing
This test feels biased by the fact that, like others have said, macOS provides keyboard shortcuts. For example, I'm only Gen Z and yet have tried for many years to use the proper dash characters in the right places, which is made much easier by virtue of being on a Mac.
Of course, I guess it's entirely possible—even accounting for OS—that this test remains statistically useful. It makes me kinda sad that my (very much human-generated) writing fails the Turing test....
MrJohz
The compose key, for those who use it, also makes it very easy to do em/en dashes, and I use them quite regularly as a result.
Tmpod
Came to say this as well. I use the compose key to write em dashes and other symbols on a daily basis. Very handy!
akho
`misc:typo` is easier
pests
Windows does too now via Windows+. which opens the "emoji keyboard" but you can switch to the "symbols" tab to see unicode. It does have multiple dashes in the quick access bar at the top or you can search.
dspillett
I've used WinCompose¹² to add key composition to Windows for many years (after discovering the concept in Unix-land), which I still find more convenient than the other options I've tried (including the Windows Emoji keyboard).
----
[2] Though having checked just now, the sequences for en-dash and em-dash don't seem to be working. Perhaps one of my custom macros is interfering somehow… (it is behaving overall, ellipsis just worked as did the following diacritic and other symbols: áèîöūñ±⁰¹²∞¡¿‽π⬚). I'll have to poke at it later and see what is ary.
Freak_NL
That has nothing to do with being on a Mac. Em-dashes and the compose-key work fine on Linux, and Android has them under the '-' of the on-screen keyboard when long-pressed.
(Windows probably has some way, but those are rarely discoverable.)
tkzed49
I disagree, there is absolutely no easy way to do it on Windows. You can install a third party program that emulates the compose key but on macos it "just works". And I think that makes a difference for 95% of users
BalinKing
That's true, I do use them a lot on iOS as well—similarly, it's a long-press on '-' to get an en or em dash.
_flux
EURKEY layout in particular has them easily accessible.
harrall
On iPhone, type two hyphens to make an em dash:
-- into —
If OP wrote their post on an iPhone, they would have inadvertently appeared as an LLM by their own test.
dan-robertson
You can also hold the hyphen key to select an en dash.
oneeyedpigeon
Does that become an en dash if it's between two numbers?
wruza
I hate that this feature doesn't have a timeout, so when you want to type "--" you have to "- -" and then go back and delete the space. You can't just wait as with double-space vs space-wait-space. It can be turned off, but that turns off other locale-based punctuation like quotes.
ogurechny
Just install a proper keyboard layout with proper typography support once.
It is maddening that the whole world uses typewriter keyboards with some facelift in the era of Unicode and even blasphemous full color emoji font rendering. What has changed in decades? Windows logo key, power keys, media keys, IE and Outlook logo keys — all Microsoft's fancies.
So initially IBM made some ad hoc decisions on what keys would be suitable for a single user office computer (as opposed to data input and admin terminals they had). Then everyone copied that, because sending unexpected scan codes could lead to bad things (random BIOS and program code couldn't care less about your ideas of forward compatibility). Then Windows became the “basic system” installed on most computers. Microsoft really pushed forward the internationalisation at the time, making a lot of national layouts and code pages (sometimes contradicting the national standards, for better or for worse). Then everyone copied what they decided. What's more important, even single byte code pages had the basic typographic symbols, anyone could've been using them for three decades, but they were not added to most physical keyboard layouts.
I wonder if that was because they wanted Word to seem more sophisticated than it was, and to make people think it was a requirement for “proper documents”, or because programmers still treated all non-ASCII symbols as free data markup constants that would “never appear in a regular text”.
n2d4
Alt+hyphen or alt+shift+hyphen is an endash/emdash. You may not have been aware of it because it's so subtle, but many people (including myself) used emdashes long before 2022
(edit: apparently only on Mac, see reply below)
jml7c5
I believe that's only on MacOS.
dragonwriter
I think Microsoft Office (maybe jiat Word, but definitely not Windows) has a similar default shortcut.
n2d4
Seems like you're correct. Interesting!
lxgr
That's one of my favorite features of macOS keyboard layouts, but it's so close to one of my least favorite ones – option + space inserting a non-breaking space.
I almost never want that, and when typing "space, en dash, space", it happens quite easily and is usually impossible to tell visually.
akho
You always want a non-breaking space before a dash.
IsTom
Works here on Linux too, so not just Macs.
tshaddox
I've been Googling "em dash" and copypasting from the Google results for a solid 15 years now. Long before LLMs.
hiccuphippo
I modify the keymap to use AltGr+dash as em dash. Very easy in Linux with xmodmap, bit more complicated in Windows with the Keyboard Layout Creator.
ogurechny
`misc:typo` has been in xkb for about 15 years. There's also xkb-birman (matching the current state of the project that inspired all of it). If your national layout does not have level 3 and 4 symbols set, those should work straight away. If it does, it is highly likely that they clash, so you need to create a suitable subset. It is highly advised to find like-minded people, discuss the best options, and then gently push the result to upstream to make it available for everyone. After all, it's Linux, if you won't do it, no one will.
null
jbverschoor
Just use the Raycast emojipicker, it's very good. Better and faster than the macOS one
maegul
Certain corners of the world have absolutely cared about and employed the proper use of all the “dashes” well before but all the way up to 2022. I’d imagine LLMs have just consumed some of that material.
dragonwriter
Pretty much everything professionally edit and typeset does, and those will generally be retained in Unicode text (obviously, not if it gets converted to ASCII). It’s less common in internet fora because not all users either know the use of dashes or have easy access to them on the devices they are using, and if its not both familiar and easy, people are going to skip it in quick messages.
dml2135
I used to intern for a literary magazine and I can confirm that half my copy-editing was enforcing proper use of em-dashes. This was well before 2022.
mkehrt
I always use an em dash when possible when I should, and double en dash when I can't, just because I'm that kind of nerd. But it is the case that a double en dash on iOS autocorrects to an em dash, so I'm suspicious of the claim that em dashes are a tell for LLM writing.
nextts
Most editors should auto changes a double dash into em dash. I thing Google Docs does for example.
mmooss
Why not a double hyphen, which has the same result?
lxgr
Not in all fonts. In most monospace fonts, two hyphens will show with a small gap between them, for example.
I also personally prefer en dashes, surrounded by whitespace on both sides, over em dashes. Apparently some WYSIWYG software interprets two hyphens as an em dash, while other will interpret that as an en dash, so I'd rather just use the real thing if possible to avoid the ambiguity.
grumbel
In Linux/Xorg with a compose/multi-key one can do:
<Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <period> : "–" U2013 # EN DASH
<Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "—" U2014 # EM DASH
More in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
Starlevel004
I refuse to care about this. A single dash is all I will ever use. I see no possible reason to use the other two.
lioeters
That's the comment I was looking for to rally behind. I use the same character `-` for all purposes: minus, hyphen, em/en dash. It's easy to type and it makes practically no difference in meaning or legibility. I refuse to waste my time differentiating between multiple variations of a short horizontal line with a few pixels more or less. Ain't nobody got time for that.
theelous3
Throwing my hat in here. The sub millimeter difference in the length of a dash conveys no additional meaning or clarity. It is impossible to argue me out of this position.
It's not like you can reliably write these consistently by hand either without going over the top in length to make it extremely obvious.
california-og
Here's some examples where the en dash could make things more clear:
-5--2°C
post-war-pre-digital era
See sections 10-O-15-Q
Try Our New York-London Flight Connection!
mvdtnz
-5°C to -2°C
post-war - pre-digital era (not a sentence any sane person would use anyway).
See sections 10-O - 15-Q
Try our New York-London flight connection! (no kind of dash clears this one up without fixing capitalisation).
quanloh
In my region at least, -5 ~ -2°C, or -5°C ~ -2°C. If the something is making people confuse, we replace it with a suitable substitution. Re-educating people is really just last resort. Is there anything keeping us from changing it other than ego?
account42
Have you heard of "to"?
theelous3
Sorry, lol? You didn't really think this through. This is what that looks like using en/em
-5—2
That looks like dogshit.
It's a mistake in the first place to decide to use only dashes and no spaces to convey all of this lol
-5 - 2 (Everyone knows a sign has no space - if you are building your sign for idiots try some of these:)
-5 > 2 -5->2 -5 <-> 2 -5 to 2 -5...2 Between -5 and 2
blah blah blah
jeffhuys
-5 - 2°C
harrall
Em dashes don’t convey much meaning or clarity for me.
Rather, seeing too short of a dash is like putting two clashing colors together or wearing two pieces of clothes that don’t match. It just looks instantly off.
It’s just not aesthetically pleasing for me.
miltonlost
Length of breath/pause with a longer dash. Read some -- Emily Dickinson poems – you'll find a world ––– of meaning ––– in the millimeter.
handoflixue
Poetry routines breaks grammar rules. A lot of poems rely on very specific white space layouts that you'd never see in writing.
And your example shows how you can just use multiple dashes instead of having three different ones.
theelous3
I have read her in the past and can't say there were world's of meaning between -'s. Can you link an example? I looked again and couldn't see any obvious ones. Generally she just completely abused the -. Does she even use a comma once? lol
MindBeams
This sort of anti-intellectualism is the perfect antidote for those who claim that improper grammar is nothing more than evidence of language "evolving."
Aardwolf
I think many grammar rules are not intellectual but just randomly evolved conventions.
E.g. some English language rule says that a comma or ending period of a non-quoted sentence goes inside the quotes if there's something quoted at the end of that sentence. That rule feels anti-intellectual to me, as if there's some misunderstanding of how hierarchical placement in one-dimensional space works (since something that's not being quoted is being put inside quotes)
theelous3
What is more intellectual about wanting to complicate the language for one reason, versus wanting to simplify it for another?
hydrogen7800
I was going to post basically this. There is only one dash, and it's the one for which my keyboard has a key. Minus sign, hyphen, or any other use case. When MS word autocorrects to something else, I always angrily undo it, because I don't know or care what it's doing.
-proud dash luddite
null
Hnrobert42
I don’t care about the length of the mark, but I did find this idea useful. Prone to excessive detail, I often find myself with a parenthetical inside of parenthetical. The developer in me insists on 2 closing parentheses. But it looks weird and nerdy. Although, using an em dash instead is probably just as nerdy.
> Dashes are used inside parentheses, and vice versa, to indicate parenthetical material within parenthetical material. ...
> The bakery’s reputation for scrumptious goods (ambrosial, even—each item was surely fit for gods) spread far and wide.
LinuxAmbulance
Long live the parenthetical!
I wish it was more popular, it neatly indicates meaning so very well.
zamalek
This is coming from someone who can only speak English: what a stupid language. How is having 3 symbols that are discernible only by their, almost identical, length a good idea? How would one grade a paper for correct usage, especially if handwritten?
I agree with you completely.
grey413
En dashes, I'll grant you, are pointless. Those can go away.
However, em dashes are a different case. The main reason why it's desirable to use em dashes (beside convention) is for clarity of purpose. The hyphen is already a very overloaded character; they're extensively used to denote ranges and link compound words. Importantly, both of those usages do not correspond to pauses in spoken language. If you're voicing a hyphen you're supposed to barrel on through it. An em dash is much closer to a parenthesis, comma, or semicolon. It's a meaningful break in the sentence, in the way that a hyphen isn't.
Now, if it were up to me I'd choose a different character to replace em dashes (maybe underscores), but that's a separate argument.
jeroenhd
I take this advice like "do not use a preposition to end a sentence with" and "pay close attention to 'much' and 'many'". Personal preferences from the 1800s taken as gospel by grammatical extremists, to the point where they're taken as some kind of solid rule in a vain attempt to forcefully shape language to a personal preference.
There are cases when you want to follow certain guidelines, for sure. If you write for a publication that adheres to Meriam-Webster, you'd better stay consistent and figure out the right AltGr code to type the right dashes. However, for the 99.99% of written media today, none of that matters.
MindBeams
"Much" and "many" are not interchangeable:
"I have too many water in the cup."
"How much people are in attendance?"
These sound obviously incorrect.
Starlevel004
> Personal preferences from the 1800s taken as gospel by grammatical extremists, to the point where they're taken as some kind of solid rule in a vain attempt to forcefully shape language to a personal preference.
This is also true of "less" and "fewer". I use "less" everywhere.
milesrout
Ending sentences with prepositions is and had always been fine. It has never been a serious rule of grammar that you may not end a sentence with a preposition. It does sometimes make a sentence sound better to rewrite it so that it doesn't end with one though. For example, "do not use a preposition to end a sentence with" sounds awkward to my ears, probably because you deliberately crafted the sentence to end with a preposition even though that is not naturally what you'd end that sentence with. (The previous sentence doesn't sound awkward to me, interestingly.)
Getting "much" and "many" right is completely different. They mean different things. Confusing them makes you sound stupid. Less vs fewer is the same. It often doesn't matter but in some cases it really grates on the ears (eg "there wasnt much people there" just sounds awful).
Dashes are not in the same category. They are orthographical conventions. They aren't really grammar. They are more like spelling. You can spell things wrong and say it doesn't matter because spelling is arbitrary and you can use the wrong dashes too, but it makes you look either uncaring or ignorant. If you want to give a good first impression, learn the basic conventions of written English and follow them.
account42
Real monsters use a signle dash but with a wider font.
sandbach
Robert Bringhurst¹ prefers the en dash in the context of setting off phrases:
"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.
"Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side."
¹https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780881791327/page/80/mode/...
tkcranny
Presently re-reading this book, The Elements of Typographic Style. It’s one of the few books I’ve gone out of my way to get a physical copy of – it’s just beautiful.
And I totally agree, space-set en dashes are vastly superior to em. I dislike the way it connects the word more closely to the word in the next clause than the phrase itself.
E.g. He left—no explanation. Vs. He left – no explanation.
To me, left—no feels like a weird gluing together than a separator for a different section.
munificent
Because I am exactly the kind of person to obsess about this sort of thing, when I was working on my last book, I spent a lot of time deciding how I wanted to style dashed subordinate clauses.
Personally, I think en dashes are too small and look like a mistaken use of a hyphen. I really only use them in their Chicago Manual of Style recommended uses like date ranges.
But I agree that em dashes without spaces around them look wrong. They glue the adjoining words together when the whole point is that the clause is secondary and should be set aside from the surrounding text.
I ended up using em dashes with a little blob of CSS to put a tiny amount of space on either side.
fsckboy
"Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side."
"Used as a phrase marker—thus—the em dash is set without normal word spaces."
>the em dash is too long for use
above, the em-dash without spaces is smaller, at least in this typeface
I've taken to using dash offsets—just as an aside—in many places were I formerly used parentheses; I find it "less interrupts" the flow of the sentence.
asplake
I think of that as “British” style (as opposed to American). I think it’s more common here and I certainly prefer it
ibaikov
So much this. Two weeks ago I learned that en dashes are used for numbers, but I thought they are what em dashes are for. Em dashes for me are too long and ugly.
7bit
That's how you use them in Germany. N-dash with spaces around, instead of an m-dash, as Americans do.
milesrout
Mr Bringhurst is wrong. Em dashes have nothing to do with Victorian aesthetics.
nayuki
Additionally:
* Use the minus sign /−/ (U+2212) when formatting numbers, because the default hyphen-minus /-/ (U+2D) just looks wrong: "It is −1 °C vs. -1 °C." Moreover, the correct minus has the same width as plus (− vs. +).
* Rare, but use the figure dash /‒/ (U+2012) or figure space / / (U+2007) if you need a placeholder character that is the same width as a single digit. For example, "Guess the PIN: 1‒34."
bangaladore
Somewhat off topic, however, I'm thoroughly convinced that there is a very high probability something is AI generated when I see Em dashes. Anyone else noticing this?
ChatGPT for example almost always uses them. I'm sure they are more common in academic writing, but its now super common on boards like Reddit.
alabastervlog
I've been employing em-dashes extensively since I went on a JD Salinger binge circa 2002. Also, "incidentally", for the same reason. I use "Nb" a lot, from reading a bunch of DFW years ago. Oh, and that very-precise construction he does with "which" all the time, I stole that.
Before LLMs, I think em-dashes mostly signaled that you read books and paid attention to details, to the extent they signaled anything.
arduanika
To generalize your point: A lot of the "brown m&ms" that we've walked around with for detecting a writers status, education, etc., are less useful in an age of LLMs.[1]
We might even be entering some waves of counter-signaling.
[1] They'll never totally nail all of DFW's mannerisms, though.
abyssin
What is this very precise construction?
alabastervlog
Something like, “the monks wore brown habits, which habits were made from wool”.
The slight ambiguity if you don’t do that now irks me, having seen a way to eliminate it.
arduanika
So you're saying that when you see an Em dash in someone's prose, it's a big minus?
bangaladore
As I said in another comment, it depends highly on the context and previous / alternative knowledge of the source.
arduanika
(How about when you see a pun in an HN thread?)
:)
pavlov
It’s largely the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. You’ve started noticing it because you just learned about it.
bangaladore
I feel this is an broad oversimplification.
When looking at the context of a given text, use of certain words or punctuation, can very well indicate AI use.
The "original" example was delve. There is no doubt that AI (did, or still does) use this word at a significantly higher frequency than the average person. I would say the same about em dashes.
When browsing a Reddit thread about a video game, if you encounter numerous comments written perfectly, especially those containing indicators like em dashes, the word delve, or similar language, it certainly can raise the question: am I genuinely seeing comments from users who write this way in this specific context, or is this content more likely produced by an LLM?
MindBeams
It sucks that people understanding their own language marks them as possibly AI.
citrus1330
No, it's not. AI uses em dashes far more frequently than the average human.
Kiro
Why is this getting downvoted? ChatGPT is completely obsessed with em dashes. I don't even know how to make it on my keyboard.
arduanika
Plausible. But apparently per TFA it's actually spelled Baader–Meinhof, with an en-dash not a hyphen.
jeroenhd
It depends. Em dashes in news articles and written publications? Definitely expected. Em dashes on social media or reddit? Either someone who works in typesetting, or an LLM. Most likely an LLM, giving the dying nature of printed media.
Only typography nerds and professional printers care about things like these. Popular media, even modern professional media, hasn't been paying all that much attention.
dkdcwashere
yep. been using them for years. others have too. it’s not weird
same thing happened with “delve” — these are just words and grammar, people use them
there is no accurate way to tell whether text came out of a neural network or not
chatmasta
I’m not sure the same happened with “delve.” I saw an analysis of paper abstracts showing a clear uptick of “delve” starting with the mass-adoption of ChatGPT. Maybe it suddenly became a trendy word — especially in paper abstracts — or maybe more paper abstracts were edited by ChatGPT.
kingo55
Combining the various "tells" of an LLM (em dashes, delve, grammatical signs etc) with the context (Reddit comments vs professional setting), you could establish a rough probability it was AI generated. At this point, it's the best we can hope for.
LeoPanthera
Gemini is in love with the phrase "It's important to..."
Whenever I see that at the start of a paragraph I know that there's an 80% chance it was written by Gemini.
dskhatri
There are regular folk who tend to be pedantic with their writing. I'm not sure this is a good test of whether text is generated by LLM. Consider that some may use LLMs to correct spelling or grammar, and the LLMs may often edit an en dash to em dash.
bangaladore
To be clear, It's essentially impossible to know if a given text is autonomously LLM generated (a bot on social media for example) or is the result of revision of real human effort.
To what extent that distinction matters, I'm not sure.
nilkn
I've encountered and used em dashes regularly for the last 20 years. If most of your reading and writing are associated with social media, I could see the trend you're describing appearing real within that limited context. But em dashes are not new and have been a feature of high quality writing for many decades.
encypherai
Yes, several of the most popular (and even lesser-popular but newly open-sourced models such as Gemma 3 27b) overuse Em dashes. Even when prompting them to not use dashes, they almost can't help themselves and include them occasionally anyways as it must be part of their learned stylometry. It's just not a common symbol to use at all as most people generally use commas for the same purpose. I can't even remember learning about Em dashes in my college english classes.
nextos
I submitted an application which I typeset using LaTeX, and some people thought it was AI-generated because of en and em dashes. I have been using these since forever.
kbenson
If it's posted through a publishing platform (not just a commend on one or on a public site), it's very possible they do an automatic conversion of some of the common cases. That could also be filtering down to comment boxes and stuff, I'm not sure.
That's not to say that generated content doesn't use them, just that using them as an indicator might require a bit of nuance based on where you're seeing them.
mychaelangelo
I’ve noticed this, too. ChatGPT especially overuses them relative to other models. It’s an easy tell-sign that something is probably LLM-written.
zimpenfish
I saw a reel the other day where some Young People(tm) were talking about "the ChatGPT hyphen" (an em-dash.) There was much wailing and gnashing of (false) teeth from Old People(tm) in the comments.
rsch
Today in “typesetting before we had typewriters”: …
At least we have dedicated O/0, and l/1 keys now. But we still see a lot of "straight" quotes instead of “those smart quotes Microsoft Word likes to generate”. And dashes. Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character? This is often set with slightly more space between dots than ..., and it by definition never wraps across a line between those dots. You still see (C) instead of ©.
It is one of those things that doesn’t really matter for readability, but although they can’t necessarily put a finger on why, people may still notice that some documents or pages appear to be set with more care for details than others.
(edit: I guess if you don’t have to search on Google what the hell a ‘Microsoft Word’ is, then you’re officially old)
thangalin
> dedicated O/0, and l/1 keys now
And the 1 and 8 aren't next to each other anymore, either. (See typewriters from the "18"00s.)
> those smart quotes
Fixing straight quotes is a hard problem[0]. My FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], includes my library, KeenQuotes[2], for replacing them at build time. It's not perfect, but can typeset my ~400 page novel without any errors.
> Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character?
Yes! Here's where it gets parsed:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...
Then emitted:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...
Then transformed into an HTML entity:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...
When typesetting Markdown, KeenWrite first converts the document to XHTML (i.e., XML), then invokes ConTeXt to convert XML into TeX macros. One of those macros handles the ellipses by converting it to \dots{}:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/-/blob/main/x...
This renders as the Unicode character in the final document: …
> set with more care for details
Some of us old folks care about these details. ;-)
keybored
People have approximated ellipsis by using `. . .`.
I use ellipsis. Which ironically is way too short when viewed in monotype…
kps
I use ellipses & dashes… perhaps the former will convince people I am human.
knallfrosch
I hate smart quotes because it's super weird to use the «French» and „German“ quotation marks.
vanschelven
for em dashes and ellipsis at least it's trivial to convert before displaying them... which I do in my own markdown-to-publication toolchain (but not here on HN).
a3w
> spans pages 128–34.
Who omits the 1 from the second number?! That is aweful!
crazygringo
Who keeps the 1?
You write pages 1,003–4, instead of typing out 1,003–1,004 which is just unnecessary.
Works the same with two digits, or even three: pp. 1,899–902.
This is standard practice and arguably clearer.
I've only ever seen it done with page ranges, though. I'm not sure if it's done with year ranges? E.g. 1984–5? Or 1989–92? You work with page ranges constantly in academia, I just don't see year ranges much in any form.
lucgommans
Literally never seen this (wish I could grep all comments I've ever replied to) and I do not understand what makes you say that it's clearer when it's dropping information, making it relative rather than a fully qualified number
In speech, it's common, and misunderstandings are usually not a problem (if you're not monologuing on a recording) because someone will just ask; but in writing it looks like the range is the wrong way around. Maybe I expect more care in writing because the feedback loop is longer, or maybe it's just habit and I think it's wrong in writing because I never see it?
crazygringo
I think you're just not used to it.
Quick, tell me how wide this range is, just as an order of magnitude:
285368737954–285368783645
Would be a lot easier if I only included the range at the end which had actually changed, wouldn't it?
That's why it's clearer. Now obviously that was an extreme example, but it's also easier to see at a glance that 1,387–9 is just three pages, as opposed to 1,387–1,389.
LegionMammal978
MLA-style citations call for abbreviating page ranges in that way. I mostly see it in literary papers, and not many other contexts, so it would be easy to notice them rarely if at all. Outside of that context, I occasionally see it used for year ranges.
MindBeams
It's definitely standard, but in what way is it clearer? An abbreviation is never more clear than the full thing it abbreviates.
EDIT: I saw your explanation below, and you make a very good point.
a3w
copy/paste, "print", paste in from page, to to page
Result:
> print pages in range from: 1, 003
> print pages in range to 4
Now have I have two errors to fix: page 1003 to page 1004. Not nice. Who formats like this?!
-------------------
Also, some RPG books or encyclopedias I own have chapter that span like this:
p. 630 to p. 70 (book 2)
To me, now is unclear, is that 70 with a reset page count, or 670 for book 2?
Since I just now learned that a quotation standard somewhere outside Germany exists that omits leading numbers, I now need to manually check where it ends.
TL;DR:
Don't make me think, and allow for automation. So just write on more number.
aio2
closest thing we have on hn to being a reddit like comment/remark lol
rossant
When I was editing an academic book published by a well-known university press, we were all asked to do that for the references. (And my colleagues, all doctors and lawyers, only knew Word and entered the references manually.)
aorth
I read Butterick's Hyphens and dashes some years ago and it stuck with me. Now I regularly use hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes correctly—I even memorized the Unicode sequences and enter them seamlessly on Linux with Ctrl-Shift-U!
uneekname
Came here to post the same link! That book is wonderfully opinionated and has helped clarify some typographic concepts for me
wraptile
Em dashes without surrounding spaces is such a ugly relic that triggers me to no end and is objectively wrong. The dash object is part of the sentence — not the two words it's separating.
Imagenuity
I agree, this bugs me too.
keybored
Using em-dash with spaces takes up way too much space. Use an en-dash then instead.
The perfect way to surround with hairspace.
starfezzy
We need a blog post documenting the ironic trend of people—themselves NPCs, actual human bots, just now realizing the em dash exists despite seeing it hundreds if not thousands of times before LLMs—flattering themselves by suggesting that anyone who understands the language at above a 5th grade level must be an LLM.
jeroenhd
Taking knowledge of the three extra pixels that are "more correct" as some kind of indicator of intelligence is silly. Pretending you're somehow above them is just sad.
Must be lonely at the top.
MindBeams
This thread is rampant with anti-intellectualism that deserves to be called out.
citrus1330
You aren't special for using em dashes, and it doesn't make someone an NPC to notice that AIs frequently make use of them.
ogurechny
The comment above is not about being special, it is about proper typography that is still everywhere around us: books, serious websites, anything done by real designers. Those people had to try hard to miss all of that.
No, it is not “politically incorrect” to call people lacking curiosity and/or education like you see them.
No, someone's personal preferences or transitory fashions are not automatically promoted to the holy reference for the whole world.
o11c
One point that is very rarely mentioned is how to place em dashes around quotations marks.
If the em dash indicates an interruption (not a planned pause) of the actual speech, the em dashes go inside the quotes (often just one, before the closing quote).
If the em dash is the narrator interjecting with additional information, the em dashes go outside the quotes.
Besides this, the question of where to put spaces when multiple forms of punctuation are combined can be quite a complex topic.
Here's an easy, if not always precise way to remember:
* Hyphens connect things, such as compound words: double-decker, cut-and-dried, 212-555-5555.
* EN dashes make a range between things: Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years: both connect not only the endpoints, but define that all the space between is included. (Compare the last usage with the phone number example under Hyphens.)
* EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts: 'What the—!'; A paragraph should express one idea—but rules are made to be broken.
Unicode has the original ASCII hyphen-minus (U+002d), as well as a dedicated hyphen (U+2010), other functional hyphens such as soft and non-breaking hyphens, and a dedicated minus sign (U+2212), and some variations of minus such as subscript, superscript, etc.
There's also the figure dash "‒" (U+2012), essentally a hyphen-minus that's the same width as numbers and used aesthetically for typsetting, afaik. And don't overlook two-em-dashes "⸺" and three-em-dashes "⸻" and horizontal bars "―", the latter used like quotation marks!