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> 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?





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”?

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.)



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