[viccis]

Em dashes are fine in throwaway casual writing like internet comments or tweets or whatever. However, I think that, in any writing that is significant enough that LLM usage is scrutinized, they often just come across as a crutch to avoid more planned out sentence flow. I think it's actually a good thing that people are feeling like they should cut down on them.

[caconym_]

Wrong. They show up in some of the best and most widely and intensely read prose that exists, with good reason. Of course, like any tool, they can be misused by people who don't know better.

[viccis]

You wanna cite any sources for that?

I don't know of any prose that relies on crutch dashes

[AlecSchueler]

Pretty much any good work of literature? Or any technical document? Framing them as "crutch dashes" doesn't instantly make them so.

[caconym_]

To make sure I wasn't posting out of my ass i opened Gravity's Rainbow to 4 or 5 random pages. All confirmed what I said above.

Maybe you should read more widely. It's good for the brain!

[viccis]

>Gravity's Rainbow

>widely and intensely read prose

Dunno about that.

Pynchon's prose is notably colloquial, complete with lots of ellipses. Congrats on your Big Boy Book™ though.

[AlecSchueler]

This comment is really below the standards one might expect here, a total and hominem. Why don't you open one of your own big boy books and tell us which one it was that used no em dashes?

[viccis]

Oh no I did a and hominem

My whole point was that opening "big boy books" doesn't actually make a point about the validity of a thing. That's just argumentum ad populum.

[caconym_]

It's just a book, man. Maybe you should read more widely; it might even cure you of the obscenely stupid opinion you've expressed here.

[viccis]

I'm widely read. Enough that I'm not a pseud trying to imply that I read a lot of super duper hard books as evidence that my midwit opinion on emdashes is better than the guy here who made me mad by criticizing them.

Let me know if you're so stoked at reading Infinite Jest that you think that's proof I'm wrong.

[zahlman]

This issue, as I understand it, is about the actual choice to use an emdash character (—) rather than a hyphen (-), and about the effort involved in doing so. It's not about sentence structure.

I don't really understand how AI developed a bias towards doing it correctly rather than doing it the lazy way. But hearing so much about emdashes qua LLM detection mechanism eventually just got me to decide that typing an ordinary hyphen really is just lazy. And then I ended up configuring my system to make it reasonably easy to type them.