Not necessarily, I don't consider myself a skilled writer by any means but I use em dashes a great deal.
Em dashes allow me to get multiple ideas into a sentence with comparatve ease and have it still make sense. Otherwise I'd have to add additional sentences to a paragraph which itself has issues. With a longer paragraph one has to worry about its readability and comprehensibility, and that means having to restructure it—remove redundancies, etc.—and that takes time.
Good writers can think ahead and do all that restructuring in their heads. When writing about an idea, concept or logical unit thereof they'll write out short, coherent and readable text all in one go, and it will make sense. I only wish I could do that.
As I see it, em dashes are more a crux for bad writers like me (they allow our text to be at least comprehensible).
Yes, true! I was tired when I clumsily made that point above (I am not a skilled writer).
I learned how to use the em dash properly about 6 months before the release of ChatGPT and then when it was released I realized that it used them all the time. So, to convince people that I both know basic grammar and I am human I started to use "--" instead of "—".
Em dashes are very similar to semicolons. You use em dashes if your related sentence is in the middle of another sentence, and semicolons if it's at the end.
They're frequently used in skilled and professional grade writing.
So as not to mislead anyone, the parent is mostly incorrect:
Here's an example sentence: Semicolons must have independent clauses—phrases that could form a full sentence on their own—on both sides of them; they are essentially alternatives for periods. Em dashes don't require independent clauses on either side.
In the italicized sentence,
* phrases that could form a full sentence on their own is not an independent clause but is valid between em dashes. on both sides of them, after the em dashes, is also not an independent clause. (The em dashes function like commas or parentheses here.)
* The parts before and after the semicolon are independent clauses. You could replace the semicolon with a period and you'd have perfectly valid grammar. I just chose to connect the two sentences a bit more.
I don't know if you can use em dashes as the parent comment describes, connecting three independent clauses:
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet—I eat them all summer.
I think the above is wrong; it should be one of the following:
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet—and I eat them all summer.: The last section is a dependent clause made by "and", not an independent clause.
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet; I eat them all summer.: One both sides of the semicolon are independent clauses; I could replace the semicolon with a period.
Maybe there are examples I'm not thinking of? I infer that the rule might be that the punctution following the em-dashed clauses should be the punctuation that would have been used without the em-dashed clause, but that's based on very limited evidence.
En dashes, I'll grant you, are pointless. Those can go away.
However, em dashes are a different case. The main reason why it's desirable to use em dashes (beside convention) is for clarity of purpose. The hyphen is already a very overloaded character; they're extensively used to denote ranges and link compound words. Importantly, both of those usages do not correspond to pauses in spoken language. If you're voicing a hyphen you're supposed to barrel on through it. An em dash is much closer to a parenthesis, comma, or semicolon. It's a meaningful break in the sentence, in the way that a hyphen isn't.
Now, if it were up to me I'd choose a different character to replace em dashes (maybe underscores), but that's a separate argument.
I imagine it would have been up to the typesetter to make the call. The conventions for dash usage are fairly straightforward. You use em-dashes for asides, en dashes for ranges, and hyphens for most other cases. Its easy to figure out the right character from context (apart from en ranges vs hyphen ranges).
It's infuriating that people are drawing this conclusion. LLMs pick up on em dash usage because professional and skilled writers use em dashes. They're a consistently useful, if niche, part of the literary toolkit.
But, no, now it's a problem because the majority of people's experience with writing is graded essays. And because LLMs emulate professionals, it's now a red flag if students write too much like professionals. What a joke.
Yep, that was also my takeaway. In addition, the population of mitochondria regulates the proportion of their specializations via fission and fusion among themselves.
I wonder if there are any disorders related to disregulation in the process.
Yes, there are many mitochondrial diseases related to defects in fission and fusion- it seems plausible that something like what you are suggesting is involved.
This is what confuses me. NYPD subpoenaed Twitter. Twitter said "no".
I don't understand why Rabbi Copwatch would be involved in fighting the subpoena.
Rabbi Copwatch should sue NYPD for infringing his civil rights by spying on him.
He has nothing to defend against. Under current law, if he doesn't want NYPD siezing papers and effects about him from Twitter, that is not his papers and effects, he needs to stop giving copies of data about himself to Twitter.
I don't like that law, but I think that's where the law sits today.
My understanding is that the customer of a service (like Twitter or an ISP) can sometimes file a motion to quash a subpoena given to their service provider. It depends on the jurisdiction and the nature of the case, however.
All court orders are warrants. That is the most basic definition of a warrant. So a subpoena issued by the court is warranted. A subpoena not issued by a court but accompanied by a separate warrant for the same information constitutes a warranted search or seizure where failure to comply with said search/seizure by the warranted party (ie. law enforcement) could constitute multiple crimes depending on the circumstances.
Well, the writer is the community manager, so at the minimum they are reading the CoC. That in itself shapes their moderation, which shapes the community.
However, in my experience core community members will read things like this CoC, at least partially. They also be fairly involved with discussions about it, which go a long way to shape a community.
Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.
Not really discounting your experiencs, but 20 years ago plenty of folks had scheduled activities. Music lessons didn't get invented in the past two decades. Nor did school/college prep. Indeed, the numbers typically show that those that did this, had a better chance of success at whatever they were scheduled to do. (This fits expectations, too. People succeed at that that they are prepared to do...)
I myself went to music lessons for a bit and did take some extra classes to catch up. But it was an hour or two a week here and there. I still had 4 out of 5 afternoons to myself any given year. And no stuff on weekends. It’s incomparable to kids schedules today.
To be fair, my schedule got quite busy in final years. But it was because I started building websites for €€€. But I doubt it’s comparable to parents-scheduled extracurricular activities. And I learned programming in my free unstructured time by myself.
I'm not confusing it. I'm questioning if people are really more scheduled today.
Especially as we get to middle and high school. Many of us had jobs back then. Isn't uncommon for many small businesses to have a lot of help they use their children for. Not even going back to farms. Though, hard not to see all of the chores that many of those would have around the place as scheduled.
Edit: Tried to stealth fix, but I did flip a less to a more at the top there. Apologies for anyone that may respond to my mistake there.
Ah! I’m not sure if I saw your post before the edit or not. To respond to what you’re saying..
I’m not 100% sure what is real and what is selection bias. What is due to class shifts, increased income earning, etc. too. This seems like something that should have studies around it with actual data, but I couldn’t find it directly with a quick search.
All I’ve personally experienced is seeing parents (and myself) struggle to get kids into various activities due to the huge demands on our own time/mental energy, and trying to figure out how to get a good outcome for the kids from it. All of these folks I know were either from low middle and now high middle, or high middle and still high middle class backgrounds.
Upper class type folks already had a set of things they ‘did’, and while there was competition, it looked different.
I found [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6720124/] which is quite interesting, but that also seems to be oriented around ‘what do various types of extracurricular activities/after school social interactions actually produce’.
Which is very interesting, and goes more to the outcome as compared to changes over time.
I think we are aligned. I certainly am more exposed to this as a parent than I remember seeing it as a kid. I can look back and remember all of my friends had sports/music/church/etc far more than I did, though.
That is, I feel it acutely, but not clear how much of this is the biases you named. Would love to see studies. I also failed finding any. I also agree it is almost certainly studied.
Doesn't make a difference for college admission, and it likely will not for a long time. It's mostly grades that decide who get's into college and bologna affirms that you have a free choice on where to attend. It does make sense to prepare your child for college in such a way that it is able to live self sufficiently and teach discipline in learning, but no university gives a crap on what debate club you ran in high school.
Discipline is one of those things that are truly important. But I don’t think parents-overscheduled activities help that much with it. Otherwise discipline goes out the window when nobody is on your shoulder anymore.
Learning to live self sufficiently is better with unstructured time IMO. When you have to learn to put together your own schedule, follow it and do day-to-day tasks. It’s horrible how many kids can’t make themselves dinner and clean up the house after themselves. Because kid is always busy and mommy takes care of everything because little 18 y/o is so tired. Of course it doesn’t help that in many cases mommy can’t do much better than microwave dinner or order a takeout :/
It's a bit of a problem that the same character is both a mark of LLMs and skilled writing.
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