[tavavex]

This post only makes the case for em dashes from a writing and expression point of you. But it misses why people now distrust em dashes - it's not about sentence structure or expression, it's the symbol itself.

I have a question to all em dash users reading this - why wouldn't I just use a regular dash in place of the normal full-length character? I have already done this several times in this very comment, and it's a very common convention on the internet. Outside publishing and other types of very high-brow writing, the fifty different variations of dashes with minor differences in length are pretty pointless, in my opinion. There's almost no scenarios where you need to make a distinction between them, what could possibly be misinterpreted because of dash length? So why not just use the regular, standard dash everywhere?

[pama]

The internet convention in the 90s used to be two dashes for the en-dash character and three dashes for em-dash character. You used a space-dash-space notation that is easy to decipher but the typical dashes variants dont have spaces around them. When I read a text message I dont expect careful typography—in a book or an article I want perfection.

More importantly though, the em-dash-in-a-sentence construct is a way of thinking and the notation is of lesser importance than the way to express oneself. I dont think the current distrust is from the symbol: the LLMs love em dashes for the same reasons many of us do, and, perhaps better than most of us, they have no trouble using the correct symbol.

[vonunov]

The em dash (at least from an American perspective) is the "regular dash". Referring constantly to the "em dash" is a new thing; in my experience, it used to be understood that "dash" by default referred to the function/role of the punctuation mark that in America we format as an em dash, and that in the UK they (mostly) format as a spaced en dash. You have that function formatted as a hyphen: a dash in the abstract but not typographically.