I've been using em dashes since long before LLMs existed, and I won't stop. Some people might think it's a sign of an LLM, but I know it's just a sign of their own short-sightedness.
It's really frustrating to have to adjust my writing style to seem more human despite being entirely human. Many of us have been using em dashes for a long time, who else do people think the LLMs learnt it from?
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.
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.
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?
And what's your argument? YOU have never read any literature that made use of em dashes? But you're showing no evidence of these dashless works at all?
N=0
And yes, you made an ad hominem, check the site guidelines. You can make your point without being a dick.
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.
> I don't know of any prose that relies on crutch dashes
If that's true then you are not widely read, and if it's false then you are a disingenuous troll and your comments here are exactly as worthless as they look. Either way your opinion is still bad. Sorry you're mad about it, but I'm done here.
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.
