[Taek]

Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing? AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it, whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it. That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash.

That's what makes it such a good giveaway. I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong, and that you do actually use the proper double long dash in your writing, but I'm guessing that you actually use the human slang for an emdash, which is visually different and easily sets your writing apart as not AI writing!

[kragen]

I have a Compose key binding in https://github.com/kragen/xcompose which maps Compose Space Minus to "—" with two thin spaces on each side of it, because I prefer the spaces. But HN rewrites the thin spaces to regular spaces, so on HN I just use "—" without the spaces, the way ChatGPT does, which is Compose Minus Minus Minus, and is in the standard Compose key bindings (if you map your keyboard to have a Compose key at all).

Examples within the last week include https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44996702, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989129, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991769, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989444. I typed all of those.

I never use space-hyphen-space instead of an em dash. I do sometimes use TeX's " --- ".

[MathMonkeyMan]

I use space-hyphen-hyphen-space because I'm always switching between systems and keyboards -- it works well enough.

[kelnos]

Same. I feel like I've been using "--" in my online writing for decades now. Take that, LLMs; I used it before it was cool... er... before it was a weak signal that a piece of text was written by an LLM.

Sigh.

[auxbuss]

Space en-dash space is standard British typography – whereas US uses em-dash and jams the words together on either side of it.

It took centuries for the written word to acquire spaces between words, and then the US decided to jam them back together again.

Curious why folk are using two hyphens "--" instead of en-dash.

[fluidcruft]

In LaTeX (and probably smartypants which is another of those bare pre-unicode ASCII to fancy text converters that can get stacked into markdown--but I can't remember if dash handling specifically is in there), "--" is en-dash and "---" is em-dash. The single "-" gives a hypen which is handled differently than an en-dash in typesetting.

So... that's just to say that people who are exposed to the sorts of can't-unsee-it-now typesetting OCD that LaTeX and various popular extension packages within that ecosystem exposes can learn to write write "--" as en-dash.

It's sort of like being unable to return to the blissful state of not being hyperaware that Ariel and Helvetica are different.

[nxobject]

I imagine for the same reason some still use two spaces after full stops - typewriter conventions.

[theodric]

Because it's not a special character.

[david-gpu]

That is what I've done for the past couple decades. There are dozens of us! Dozens!

[kragen]

I did that until I learned to use TeX last millennium, but it's a pernicious bad habit in TeX, so I stopped.

[cosmic_cheese]

Macs and iDevices have been auto-transforming -- into – for well over a decade now, and on the iOS standard keyboard both – and — are just a single long press of the dash key away.

[c0nducktr]

Microsoft Word does this too. I've recently started manually uncorrecting these corrections in my writing because of this new implication that I used Chat-GPT.

Still less obvious than the emails I see sent out which contain emojis, so maybe I'm overthinking things...

[aksss]

This is a ridiculous maladaptive behavior. Word has been replacing dashes forever, consequently it has been unintentionally ubiquitous in business writing forever. That this character ever became a heuristic for AI is silly.

[saalweachter]

I mostly find myself uncorrecting it when I'm trying to document command line flags.

[olddustytrail]

You can edit the list of autocorrect to remove any you don't want (or add new ones).

Also you can ctrl-z immediately after an autocorrect to undo it.

[aksss]

the dashes and the auto capitalization are awful for technical writing. The ctrl-z becomes painful and annoying very quickly. Would that Word supported markdown.

[lo_zamoyski]

There's also Option (+ Shift) + -.

[wk_end]

My Mac doesn't -- at least not as far as I can tell.

[hug]

You will have turned off the function "use smart quotes and dashes" in the spelling & prediction settings.

[wk_end]

No, it's on (by default I assume).

In certain places it does seem to do the substitution - Notes for example - but in comment boxes on here and (old) Reddit at least it doesn't.

[cosmic_cheese]

It’s a per-app setting that sometimes needs to be set in the text field’s context menu. There’s also a few apps that just don’t integrate with the macOS text system.

[wk_end]

Well, I see no way to set it in Chrome. A good reason to be a little suspicious of Reddit or HN posts with em-dashes IMO.

[codazoda]

A long press of - should give it as an option as well. Mine auto translates it but I can’t recall if I added it or not.

[lambda]

I would write it with Option-shift-hyphon when I used macOS.

On Linux, I use Compose-hyphen-hyphen-hyphen.

I don't use it as often as I used to; but when I was younger, I was enough of a nerd to use it in my writing all the time. And yes, always careful to use it correctly, and not confuse it with an en-dash. Also used to write out proper balanced curly quotes on macOS, before it was done automatically in many places.

[the_other]

> I would write it with Option-shift-hyphon when I used macOS.

I'm gonna use it more thanks to this tip. Thanks!

I don't care if people or robots think I'm a robot.

[pwdisswordfishz]

AltGr+Shift+hyphen is easier, I think.

[mitthrowaway2]

I always used to google search "emdash unicode" and copy-paste the character, but I guess now I'll save several minutes from my essay-writing by switching to the lazy single-dash typology that I don't like the look of. Soon I'm going to have to start throwing in speling errors and other things too.

[echelon]

These uncommon words and punctuation have always been frequently used on Hacker News.

We're the training data.

[r9l]

Mmm interesting point. The age of introducing error to prove humanity is upon us.

[dotinvoke]

A mobile keyboard—limited as it is—has no trouble producing an em-dash, requiring little more than a long press on the - button.

[stevage]

Thanks — I didn't know that.

[latentsea]

I didn't even know it was called an em dash.

[acdha]

> That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash.

There’s a subculture effect: this has been trivial on Apple devices for a long time—I’m pretty sure I learned the Shift-Option-hyphen shortcut in the 90s, long before iOS introduced the long-press shortcut—and that’s also been a world disproportionately popular with the kind of people who care about this kind of detail. If you spend time in communities with designers, writers, etc. your sense of what’s common is wildly off the average.

[dragonwriter]

> Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing?

"the formal emdash"?

> AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it

Setting an em-dash closed is separate from whether you using an em-dash (and an em-dash is exactly what it says, a dash that is the width of the em-width of the font; "double long" is fine, I guess, if you consider the en-dash "single long", but not if, as you seem to be, you take the standard width as that of the ASCII hyphen-minus, which is usually considerably narrower than en width in a proportional font.)

But, yes, most people who intentionally use em-dashes are doing so because they care about detail enough that they are also going to set them closed, at least in the uses where that is standards. (There are uses where it is conventional to set them half-closed, but that's not important here.)

> whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it.

That's not an em-dash (and its not even an approximation of one, using a hyphen-minus set open—possibly doubled—is an approximation of the typographic convention of using an en-dash set open – different style guides prefer that for certain uses for which other guides prefer an em-dash set closed.) But I disagree with your claim that "most humans" who describe themselves as using em-dashes instead are actually just approximating the use of en-dashes set open with the easier-to-type hyphen-minus.

[viccis]

>> whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it.

>That's not an em-dash (blahblahblah...

What, exactly, did you thing "slang" in the phrase "slang version" meant?

[dragonwriter]

It was an abuse of “slang” to mean “typographic approximation”; now what, exactly, did you think “and its not even an approximation of one, using a hyphen-minus set open—possibly doubled—is an approximation of the typographic convention of using an en-dash set open” meant?

[thrtythreeforty]

I do use the hyphen-minus set open sometimes - I'd prefer em-dash closed everywhere, but sometimes it's difficult to type an em-dash, and if I'm having to use hyphen, a closed hyphen looks very wrong. Similarly, "--" is shorthand for en-dash as you say, and "---" (even closed) looks too busy.

[barnabee]

I’ve used “real” em-dashes and en-dashes in my writing generally since I switched to using Macs about 20 years ago. Before that I used them for e.g. academic writing, which I mainly did in LaTeX, but not so often elsewhere.

They’re simple enough key combinations (on a Mac) that I wouldn’t be surprised if I guessed them. I certainly find it confusing to imagine someone who has to write professionally or academically not working out how to type them for those purposes at least.

[al_borland]

I learned the keyboard shortcut so I can type the proper thing. I did the same for the ellipsis.

Also, phone keyboards make it easy. Just hold down the - and you can select various types.

[frogpelt]

I actually use the em dash. I learned it from Butterick’s practical typography years ago.

https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

[brendoelfrendo]

I will use a double hyphen: -- which Microsoft Word and I think most word processors I've used will auto-replace with an em dash. I will sometimes even type the double hyphen to represent an em dash in places where it doesn't get replaced, like internet comments. I'm kind of surprised more people don't use two hyphens as em dash shorthand, to be honest.

[bryanlarsen]

IIRC, -- for emdash used to be common on Usenet, which is where I picked it up and still do it. But there's a word for us with usenet experience -- old. (should have been a colon there, but...)

[jaysonelliot]

Most people probably don't. I'm an editor who's been working in print for years, so the keyboard shortcut for an em dash is muscle memory for me at this point. I have always been a Chicago Manual of Style person, so I don't place spaces around the em dash. AP style guide users do place a space around it.

[Procrastes]

I have --- set to autocorrect to —. I've been using it in formal writing for 30 years. When we were in high school, we had a "Dash Party" in English class, where we ate Twinkies and learned about the different dashes.

I would argue that LLMs overuse the emdash more because they overuse specific rhetorical devices, e.g. antithesis, than because they are being too correct about punctuation.

[latexr]

> Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing?

I’m not the person you asked, but I do.

> the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it

The spaces around it depend on style guide, it is not universal that they should not exist.

> That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key

Nor do they have keys for proper quotes and apostrophes or interrobangs, yet it doesn’t stop people from using them. The keys don’t need to exist.

> That's what makes it such a good giveaway.

It’s not. It might be one signal but it is far from sufficient.

> I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong, and that you do actually use the proper double long dash in your writing

I do use the proper em-dash in my writing—and many other characters too—and my HN history is ample proof. I explained at length in another comment how I insert the characters, plus how simple it is if you use any Apple OS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003650

[slipperydippery]

Nah, I've been using them correctly for years. My preference for them came by way of reading a lot in generally, but especially from Salinger.

I do them without surrounding spaces, because that's... how you're supposed to use them, and it's also less typing.

They also used to be a really good Shibboleth to tell if someone was using a Mac—the key combo on there is easy, and also easy to remember, so Mac users were far more likely than the median to employ em-dashes. It wasn't a sure tell, but it was pretty reliable.

[fngjdflmdflg]

I use en dash with two spaces and have done so before AI. But my comments here are from after GPT 4 released, so I guess I can't prove I didn't use AI to write them, although I don't think any AIs use that style. Here is one from February 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386480. I don't like how "-" looks, it just looks like a minus sign and too short.

[taurusnoises]

> "I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong"

Been using shift+option+hyphen to make and use em-dashes (sans spaces) since at least 2005, when I got my first publishing job and also started blogging (so writing a ton more). I also use option+hyphen (en-dash) for date and number ranges. In my experience, ChatGPT consistently adds spaces around both.

[Springtime]

I've had an Autohotkey replacement for the proper em dash character for over 10 years, using shorthand characters which triggers the replacement. Whether spaces are around the dash is a difference in style (see: various publications' style guides), though I use the no spaces style.

Being able to insert self-interjections and such with the correct character would undoubtedly be more widespread if it were more accessible to insert for most.

[thomascountz]

I for one, use an actual em dash in my writing—or at least I used to. Option + Shift + the hyphen key on Mac. I never knew if I was using it correctly, but I'd learn to copy how I'd seen it used in books and articles and things. Now, I have an incessant paranoia around using it.

[knowitnone2]

if very few humans use it, how did AI learn to use it since it was trained on mostly human writing?

[saithound]

The same way it learned to act like a personal assistant, even though very few humans are personal assistants.

The LLM is first trained as an extreneley large Markov model predicting text scraped from the entire Internet. Ideally, a well trained such Markov model would use em dashes approximately as frequently as they appear in real texts.

But that model is not the LLM you actually interact with. The LLM you interact with is trained by somethig called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, which involves people reading, rating and editing its responses, biasing the outputs and giving the model a "persona".

That persona is the actual LLM you interact with. Since em dash usage was rated highly by the people providing the feedback, the persona learned to use it much more frequently.

[kahirsch]

Professional writers and editors use it.

[eclipticplane]

I did as well, yes. It was an easy keyboard shortcut on Macs. For many, many years.

No longer. Just like you can no longer bold key phrases, you can no longer use emdashes if your writing being ID'd as "AI" is important (or not).

[sorrythanks]

I've been using the proper emdash for a very long time.

on Macintosh: option+shift+-

on Linux: compose - - -

[redwall_hp]

Option + shift + hyphen or hold hyphen on any Mac or iPhone to get an em dash. I use them very frequently, because they're the correct character for the use case.

[losvedir]

It's just Option + dash. Using option as a modifier is second nature if you ever write other than English and need, eg, é or ñ or something.

[jandy]

Fwiw, that’s actually an En dash not an Em dash. You need a Shift in there to get an Em dash.

[latexr]

It depends on the keyboard layout. Some (US) do have it like you described, but others have the dashes reversed.

Both make sense, to a degree. On the one hand you can argue that the em-dash—being longer—should require and extra key, but on the other hand it has more uses so it should not have the extra key to be more accessible.

[jandy]

Ah I hadn’t considered keyboard layouts.

[TrackerFF]

Yes, that's been my take too. But apparently some phones, like iphones, will convert '--' to emdash.

[heisenzombie]

Yes. Others have pointed out the shortcuts in iOS and macOS. For Windows—I have Alt-0151 in muscle memory.

[kayodelycaon]

I write fiction and use proper em-dashes all the time in long form writing. It's option + - on macOS.

[jibal]

> I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong

I've found that people who say this sort of thing rarely change their beliefs, even after being given evidence that they are wrong. The fact is, as numerous people have pointed out, Word and other editors/word processors change '--' to an em-dash. And the "slang version" of an em-dash is "I went to work--but forgot to put on pants", not "I went to work - but forgot to put on pants".

BTW, "humans almost always tend to use" is very poor writing--pick one or the other between "almost always" and "tend to". It wouldn't be a bad thing if LLMs helped increase human literacy, so I don't know why people are so gung ho on identifying AI output based on utterly non-substantive markers like em-dashes. Having an LLM do homework is a bad thing, but that's not what we're talking about. And someone foolishly using the presence of em-dashes to detect LLM output will utterly fail against someone using an editor macro to replace em-dashes with the gawdawful ' - '.

[Nullabillity]

> Word and other editors/word processors change '--' to an em-dash

I'd be suspicious of people doing their writing in Word and copying it over into random comment fields, too.

> And the "slang version" of an em-dash is "I went to work--but forgot to put on pants", not "I went to work - but forgot to put on pants".

The fun thing about slang is that different groups have different slangs! I use the latter pretty regularly, but have never done the former.

> BTW, "humans almost always tend to use" is very poor writing--pick one or the other between "almost always" and "tend to".

Nah.

> It wouldn't be a bad thing if LLMs helped increase human literacy,

Where "literacy" is defined as strictly following arbitrary rules without any concern for whether it actually helps people read it?

And, on the assumption that those rules actually are meaningful, wouldn't you rather have people learn them for themselves?

[citizenkeen]

But do you call that latter thing you do “an em-dash”? Do you tell a peer “You should put an em-dash here” when what you mean is a “space en-dash space”?

[Nullabillity]

I don't call it anything, because I'm not in the business of telling people how to write. (Besides asking them not to use SlopGPT, of course.)

[jibal]

P.S. Why would someone be "suspicious" of people doing their writing in Word and copying it into a comment field? Suspicious of what, exactly? What crime is being committed? The issue here is AI, not people's workflow methods. I have sometimes written lengthy comments in my editor (emacs) which gives me many more editing features, doesn't throw away my work with the wrong keystroke (not a problem at HN but it is at sites where the comment field is a pop-up), and doesn't randomly freeze or slow down radically (this seems to be a problem with my browser).

I reject everything else about that poorly reasoned "suspicious" response as well.

[exe34]

I use \-- and \--- in LaTeX, without the backslash.

[CurtMonash]

I type em dashes as double hyphens. Sometimes the software resolves them to a true em dash, but sometimes not.

I never use hyphens where em dashes would be correct.

I do have issues determining when a two-word phrase should or shouldn't be hyphenated. It surely doesn't help that I grew up in a bilingual English/German household, so that my first instinct is often to reject either option, and fully concatenate the two words instead.

(Whether that last comma is appropriate opens a whole other set of punctuation issues ... and yes, I do tend to deliberately misuse ellipses for effect.)