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Re:The melancholy decline of the semicolon by ineedasername on Saturday November 27, 2021 @11:49AM (#29361460)
I had to read a lot of Heidegger, who was interesting on a macro level but interminably boring on the micro level needed to see the macro. His readability was helped by the use of very visible double dashes-- sort of an extended version of the double-comma appositive structure in a sentence-- so the structure of his writing was easier to follow.

I liked that much more visual que enough that I adopted it myself for a while. Over time, I recognized that when I found myself reaching for the technique it meant that I probably needed to restructure things into more discrete chunks that build sequentially. When possible, conveying complex information benefits from as simple a structure as the information can manage.

Re:The melancholy decline of the semicolon by layer8 on Saturday November 27, 2021 @03:10PM (#29362940)
> Over time, I recognized that when I found myself reaching for the technique

I had a similar experience with parentheses.

Re:The melancholy decline of the semicolon by gnubison on Saturday November 27, 2021 @07:03PM (#29364866)
They’re called “em dashes”, and they look like this: —

You can find a Real, Genuine Em Dash™ at https://emda.sh, or insert one using ‘C-k - M’ in Vim or ‘Compose - - -’ on Linux — not sure about other platforms.

Re:The melancholy decline of the semicolon by ineedasername on Saturday November 27, 2021 @09:10PM (#29365553)
Thanks— I didn't realize there was an actual character for them. Though IIRC MSWord would sometimes auto format them into that single extended dash appearance.
Re:The melancholy decline of the semicolon by gnubison on Sunday November 28, 2021 @11:35AM (#29370246)
Yes, iPhones automatically merge two dashes together as well.
Re:The melancholy decline of the semicolon by notinty on Saturday November 27, 2021 @11:45PM (#29366225)
Alt hyphen on macOS, hold on most all mobile platforms.