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Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by A_D_E_P_T on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:41PM (#43497927)
AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: --

Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by BalinKing on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:06PM (#43498177)
This test feels biased by the fact that, like others have said, macOS provides keyboard shortcuts. For example, I'm only Gen Z and yet have tried for many years to use the proper dash characters in the right places, which is made much easier by virtue of being on a Mac.

Of course, I guess it's entirely possible—even accounting for OS—that this test remains statistically useful. It makes me kinda sad that my (very much human-generated) writing fails the Turing test....

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by MrJohz on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:08PM (#43498197)
The compose key, for those who use it, also makes it very easy to do em/en dashes, and I use them quite regularly as a result.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Tmpod on Thursday March 27, 2025 @09:28PM (#43500390)
Came to say this as well. I use the compose key to write em dashes and other symbols on a daily basis. Very handy!
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by akho on Friday March 28, 2025 @05:53AM (#43503405)
`misc:typo` is easier
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Freak_NL on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:13PM (#43498799)
That has nothing to do with being on a Mac. Em-dashes and the compose-key work fine on Linux, and Android has them under the '-' of the on-screen keyboard when long-pressed.

(Windows probably has some way, but those are rarely discoverable.)

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by tkzed49 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:33PM (#43499501)
I disagree, there is absolutely no easy way to do it on Windows. You can install a third party program that emulates the compose key but on macos it "just works". And I think that makes a difference for 95% of users
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by underwater on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:32AM (#43501563)
Install PowerToys, hold dash and then press space. This works for all the variants for any keyboard character.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by pests on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:47AM (#43501952)
Hit Windows+. click on the "Symbols" tab and they're right there under general punctuation.

Released back in 2019 for Windows 10.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dboreham on Friday March 28, 2025 @09:20AM (#43505117)
I've always (well...for 20 years) done a Google search for "em-dash" then copy/paste the character off whatever result page come up. Word and other fancy editors always provided a popup pane where these characters could be clicked to insert.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by marcellus23 on Friday March 28, 2025 @10:48AM (#43506117)
It's a bit funny. On macOS en and em dashes can be natively typed with alt+- and alt+shift+-. The responses to your comment are apparently suggesting these methods are just as easy as that:

1. Install and configure this extra tool, which also by default enables a ton of other things you may not want, and may as well be a third-party tool even though it's technically built by Microsoft

2. Do a Google search and copy-paste (!)

3. Use a keyboard shortcut to bring up a symbol picker, then click on the tab containing the en and em dashes, then click to type them in

I mean, come on.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by tkzed49 on Friday March 28, 2025 @04:32PM (#43509570)
yeah, this is exactly my point haha. these are not at all the same
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by BalinKing on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:17PM (#43498830)
That's true, I do use them a lot on iOS as well—similarly, it's a long-press on '-' to get an en or em dash.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by _flux on Friday March 28, 2025 @02:29PM (#43508583)
EURKEY layout in particular has them easily accessible.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by harrall on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:11PM (#43498774)
On iPhone, type two hyphens to make an em dash:

-- into —

If OP wrote their post on an iPhone, they would have inadvertently appeared as an LLM by their own test.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dan-robertson on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:27PM (#43499443)
You can also hold the hyphen key to select an en dash.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by oneeyedpigeon on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:22PM (#43498881)
Does that become an en dash if it's between two numbers?
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by icy on Friday March 28, 2025 @03:20AM (#43502474)
It does indeed! One of my favourite iOS keyboard features.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by wruza on Thursday March 27, 2025 @09:38PM (#43500462)
I hate that this feature doesn't have a timeout, so when you want to type "--" you have to "- -" and then go back and delete the space. You can't just wait as with double-space vs space-wait-space. It can be turned off, but that turns off other locale-based punctuation like quotes.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by pests on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:47AM (#43501946)
Windows does too now via Windows+. which opens the "emoji keyboard" but you can switch to the "symbols" tab to see unicode. It does have multiple dashes in the quick access bar at the top or you can search.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dspillett on Friday March 28, 2025 @08:20AM (#43504469)
I've used WinCompose¹² to add key composition to Windows for many years (after discovering the concept in Unix-land), which I still find more convenient than the other options I've tried (including the Windows Emoji keyboard).

----

[1] https://wincompose.info/

[2] Though having checked just now, the sequences for en-dash and em-dash don't seem to be working. Perhaps one of my custom macros is interfering somehow… (it is behaving overall, ellipsis just worked as did the following diacritic and other symbols: áèîöūñ±⁰¹²∞¡¿‽π⬚). I'll have to poke at it later and see what is ary.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by n2d4 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:45PM (#43497951)
Alt+hyphen or alt+shift+hyphen is an endash/emdash. You may not have been aware of it because it's so subtle, but many people (including myself) used emdashes long before 2022

(edit: apparently only on Mac, see reply below)

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by jml7c5 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:47PM (#43497975)
I believe that's only on MacOS.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dragonwriter on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:03PM (#43498702)
I think Microsoft Office (maybe jiat Word, but definitely not Windows) has a similar default shortcut.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by harrall on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:15PM (#43498812)
You don't need a shortcut on Word.

You just type two hyphens (--) and Word will convert it to an em dash.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by hunter2_ on Thursday March 27, 2025 @11:43PM (#43501306)
Across the Office suite:

Typing <word><hyphenminus><hyphenminus><word><space> yields an em dash.

Typing <word><space><hyphenminus><hyphenminus><space><word><space> yields an en dash.

That this has been true for some 3 or 4 decades makes me doubt all the comments that em dashes are a "tell" of LLM authorship. On the other hand, I guess when we confine this possibility to web content, I can see how people haven't used Office for web authoring lately, and whatever they do use (like web-based content management systems) don't tend to have this feature.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by iggldiggl on Friday March 28, 2025 @04:21AM (#43502846)
> Typing <word><space><hyphenminus><hyphenminus><space><word><space> yields an en dash.

More importantly, typing just a single hyphen minus in this constellation triggers the autoreplace, too. (Typing the double hyphen is only necessary without spaces in order to distinguish between an intentional hyphen and an em dash.)

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by hunter2_ on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:57PM (#43507625)
Good point. Either way, it's kind of peculiar that getting an en dash in this manner demands flanking the hyphen(s) with spaces, and those spaces persist after replacement, when the typical usage of an en dash specifically doesn't demand spaces.

From TFA:

> August 1–August 31

From a top comment:

> Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years

To achieve this using the replacement feature we're talking about would take something like <word><space><hyphenminus><space><word><space><alt+leftarrow><bksp><leftarrow><bksp><alt+rightarrow> which is ridiculous.

In professional typesetting, like a book, I sometimes see spaces flanking an em dash, however.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by venusenvy47 on Friday March 28, 2025 @10:04AM (#43505579)
I can't get this to work in Powerpoint. It's funny, I clicked on this thread because I was struggling with trying to make an "emdash" in Powerpoint yesterday and couldn't find the correct search term for the "long hyphen" that I was looking for.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by hunter2_ on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:52PM (#43507547)
Works fine for me on PowerPoint for Mac, oddly enough. Unrelatedly, Mac also allows easy (non-alt-code) keyboard entry: option-hyphen yields an en dash, while option-shift-hyphen yields an em dash.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by QuantumGood on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:59PM (#43499208)
Turns into different things (like a bulleted list) in different situations in Word, though.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by n2d4 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:48PM (#43497987)
Seems like you're correct. Interesting!
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by lxgr on Thursday March 27, 2025 @08:56PM (#43500141)
That's one of my favorite features of macOS keyboard layouts, but it's so close to one of my least favorite ones – option + space inserting a non-breaking space.

I almost never want that, and when typing "space, en dash, space", it happens quite easily and is usually impossible to tell visually.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by akho on Friday March 28, 2025 @06:06AM (#43503484)
You always want a non-breaking space before a dash.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by lxgr on Friday March 28, 2025 @11:51AM (#43506911)
How so? Wouldn't this prevent line breaks around dashes bracketing parenthetical statements? That's the opposite of what I want!
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by akho on Saturday March 29, 2025 @03:05AM (#43513432)
Line starting with a dash can be mistaken for dialogue or dashed list, which is not what you want.

In any case: non-breaking space (or otherwise suppressed linebreak, if you don’t use a space) is the rule.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by IsTom on Friday March 28, 2025 @07:19AM (#43503998)
Works here on Linux too, so not just Macs.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by tshaddox on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:38PM (#43498488)
I've been Googling "em dash" and copypasting from the Google results for a solid 15 years now. Long before LLMs.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by hiccuphippo on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:09PM (#43499299)
I modify the keymap to use AltGr+dash as em dash. Very easy in Linux with xmodmap, bit more complicated in Windows with the Keyboard Layout Creator.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by ogurechny on Thursday March 27, 2025 @09:40PM (#43500476)
`misc:typo` has been in xkb for about 15 years. There's also xkb-birman (matching the current state of the project that inspired all of it). If your national layout does not have level 3 and 4 symbols set, those should work straight away. If it does, it is highly likely that they clash, so you need to create a suitable subset. It is highly advised to find like-minded people, discuss the best options, and then gently push the result to upstream to make it available for everyone. After all, it's Linux, if you won't do it, no one will.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by jbverschoor on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:06PM (#43498727)
Just use the Raycast emojipicker, it's very good. Better and faster than the macOS one
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by oneeyedpigeon on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:21PM (#43498867)
I've tried to use real hyphens and dashes since learning a bit about typography roughly 10–15 years ago. macOS makes it really easy with just alt and hyphen for en-dash, shift+alt and hyphen for em-dash. Definitely not an "obvious tell" of an LLM!
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by apt-apt-apt-apt on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:53PM (#43499653)
Thanks for the '⇧⌥<dash>' tip— from 2022–2025, I have been using macOS en's thinking they were em's.

(Side note: GTP says apostrophes should be used for pluralizing only for single letters to avoid confusion, but this seems more readable than "ens and ems" IMO.)

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dml2135 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:58PM (#43498089)
I used to intern for a literary magazine and I can confirm that half my copy-editing was enforcing proper use of em-dashes. This was well before 2022.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by maegul on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:29PM (#43498405)
Certain corners of the world have absolutely cared about and employed the proper use of all the “dashes” well before but all the way up to 2022. I’d imagine LLMs have just consumed some of that material.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dragonwriter on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:06PM (#43498730)
Pretty much everything professionally edit and typeset does, and those will generally be retained in Unicode text (obviously, not if it gets converted to ASCII). It’s less common in internet fora because not all users either know the use of dashes or have easy access to them on the devices they are using, and if its not both familiar and easy, people are going to skip it in quick messages.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by mkehrt on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:04PM (#43498153)
I always use an em dash when possible when I should, and double en dash when I can't, just because I'm that kind of nerd. But it is the case that a double en dash on iOS autocorrects to an em dash, so I'm suspicious of the claim that em dashes are a tell for LLM writing.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by mmooss on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:16PM (#43499350)
Why not a double hyphen, which has the same result?
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by lxgr on Thursday March 27, 2025 @08:43PM (#43500031)
Not in all fonts. In most monospace fonts, two hyphens will show with a small gap between them, for example.

I also personally prefer en dashes, surrounded by whitespace on both sides, over em dashes. Apparently some WYSIWYG software interprets two hyphens as an em dash, while other will interpret that as an en dash, so I'd rather just use the real thing if possible to avoid the ambiguity.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by nextts on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:12PM (#43498237)
Most editors should auto changes a double dash into em dash. I thing Google Docs does for example.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by kbenson on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:27PM (#43498389)
Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on my terminal locale settings and man (well, troff/groff most likely) was converting hyphens in param definitions to some sort of dash character, meaning I couldn't copy and paste out of the man page. I think it also affected perldoc for the same reason.

I don't doubt there are publishing platforms that do it automatically as well, so I wouldn't count on seeing them as an indicator of generated output, even if it may be processed in some manner.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by tedunangst on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:30PM (#43498417)
This is because the original was written using the wrong markup. When the output was ascii, nobody noticed, but it matters when the output is unicode.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by o11c on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:59PM (#43498672)
That's revisionism. It was considered correct historically, before someone decided to unilaterally declare all existing man pages "wrong".
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by tedunangst on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:21PM (#43499403)
It's like we spent twenty years writing (mindlessly copying) web pages with &mdash and only viewing them with lynx, and then somebody makes a graphical browser and the mistake is apparent, but I don't think the browser is in the wrong.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by blueflow on Friday March 28, 2025 @06:52AM (#43503816)
Context: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html

Money quote:

  This issue does indeed have a history of provoking unhinged lunacy.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by mmooss on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:14PM (#43499331)
Most word processing applications auto-substitute EM dashes as appropriate - some do it for two consecutive hyphens, iirc. I don't know if they substitute EN dashes automatically ... I don't know if there's a logic for that without understanding the text.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by grumbel on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:54PM (#43498059)
In Linux/Xorg with a compose/multi-key one can do:

<Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <period> : "–" U2013 # EN DASH

<Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "—" U2014 # EM DASH

More in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by wil421 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:48PM (#43497991)
The engineers of various AIs are probably reading your comment and making adjustments.

Or we are both just AIs, as a portion of HN comments are, commenting back and forth about other AIs.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by nextts on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:12PM (#43498246)
As are super pedantic humans.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by edflsafoiewq on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:10PM (#43498218)
It's &mdash; in HTML or Markdown.

If you use eg. a Japanese IME, you can also get it by typing a normal hyphen and selecting the em dash from the picker.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by layman51 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:11PM (#43498231)
That’s interesting to note. I have usually taken the time to properly use en-dashes when it seems appropriate because I frequently deal with strings that represent academic years. At least where I live, these span two calendar years. I have noticed that a lot of college websites tend to use the en-dash properly (e.g. on their academic calendar webpages).
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by akshayshah on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:53PM (#43498054)
Em- and en-dashes have been well-supported by LaTeX, the smartypants family of Markdown extensions, and plain HTML for more than 20 years.

In your support, though, calling the extension “smartypants” really hints at the target audience :)

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by PhunkyPhil on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:44PM (#43498537)
Iphones will autocorrect two hyphens to an em dash
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by unleaded on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:08PM (#43499285)
What i've been using: Install https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose and you can then press AltGr then three hyphens to insert one. or if you're on Linux just search for "compose key".
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by account-5 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:55PM (#43499180)
I recently got accused of using AI for some writing I submitted because I regularly use both en-dashes and em-dashes, and have for years. I said in another thread recently they are second and third, to semi-colons, as my favourite punctuation marks.

I was able to demonstrate my long use of them, prior to LLMs. And since I write in quarto markdown I don't need keyboard shortcuts.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by kingo55 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:36PM (#43498472)
More sophisticated clients require we use dashes correctly. I first encountered it pre-pandemic, so in professional contexts it's not a sure-fire signal of LLM use — Should you see em dashes correctly used in the Hacker News comments or Reddit, for that matter, then it's pretty reliable tell... Usually. ;)
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by necovek on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:43PM (#43498529)
As I mentioned above, I've had them easily accessible with a keyboard layout for >20 years on all the systems I've used — the only caveat that I find it really ugly with no spaces around em-dashes, which is usually recommended for English.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by lxgr on Thursday March 27, 2025 @08:52PM (#43500111)
I'd like to have the record show that I've been using them since before LLMs :)

Not sure when I started; my guess is that I got into the habit of using them in LaTeX when writing my thesis, and then at some point realized that they are easily reachable on standard macOS keyboard layouts (via "option" + "-").

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by starfezzy on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:37PM (#43499020)
The lack of em dash usage in popular culture speaks more about typical people than it does about whether a text's author was an LLM. In fact, the average person has never even noticed—let alone considered—that the em dash exists. If they've read for 20+ years, they've seen at LEAST hundreds of them.

Imagine being an NPC (a human bot), flattering yourself with the thought that people who understand the language are language bots...

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by ryandrake on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:52AM (#43501660)
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024 and 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level[1]. “The average person” isn’t really a high bar, unfortunately.

1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by andelink on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:28AM (#43501858)
Is this a legitimate institute? The linked article offers many statistics and even financial figures but cites no sources or studies. There is a “TOLL FREE” (capitalized) phone number in the website footer, and the comments are full of prostitution ads.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by ryandrake on Friday March 28, 2025 @10:44AM (#43506066)
Wikipedia[1] contains more links to data, if you want to sample a few more sources.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by A_D_E_P_T on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:31PM (#43508014)
Not at all. It's just inconvenient for most of the Windows-using world, as the characters are not accessible. It's ALT+[whatever] or Google-it-and-ctrl+V. Hence an awful lot of internet writing didn't really use any of that stuff properly.

See, e.g., Boss Szabo's blog: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-many-tradition...

Two chained hypens, as was pretty much the norm back then.

And did you just call me an NPC?!? It's not a matter of "understanding the language" at all. It's a matter of convenience and of a sort of evolved convention.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by metaphor on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:40PM (#43499053)
I use --- to represent em dash in prose here, e.g. [1][2]. The behavior is just a residual of long time exposure to TeX.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41833665

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41774199

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by thomasfromcdnjs on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:14PM (#43499336)
Someone should parse HN api and figure out total dash usage and see if there is a spike in recent times aha

I write poems a fair bit and use em dash a lot. (maybe too much and incorrectly)

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by necovek on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:39PM (#43498490)
While this is true, this is an amazingly silly omission.

Serbian and Croatian XKB keyboard layouts have had em- and en-dashes since early 2000s even if they were not standardized: AltGr (right Alt) + hyphen (to the left of right Shift) produces an em-dash, and press Shift on top, and you get an en-dash.

This is how long I've had them easily accessible on any keyboard (I even have them converted to MacOS keyboard layouts for use with Karabiner).

http://srpski.org/dunav/raspored-c.html

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by QuantumGood on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:57PM (#43499193)
I have typed Alt+0151 almost every day for decades—and now with some annoyance I am limiting their use due to the "that's how LLMs write."
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by tomrod on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:32PM (#43498437)
I wrote for a magazine during college days a few decades ago that uses the Chicago manual of style. I still use em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens regularly. They don't show up as such in markdown, but they are effectively: one dash for hyphen, two for em-dash, and one with spaces surrounding it for en dash.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by AstralSerenity on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:17PM (#43498838)
"Windows" + "." brings up symbols, and at the very top were em dashes. I've been using that since it was added.

On my Linux laptop, I confess to manually Googling them every time.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dadoum on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:52PM (#43498049)
I use a compose key on Linux to write those. By default you should have these compositions available: --- → — || --. → –
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by beejiu on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:46PM (#43499108)
If em dashes were uncommon pre-2022, they wouldn't have ended up in the LLM training sets.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by thesauri on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:45PM (#43497959)
On Macs:

Hyphen -: -

En Dash –: alt -

Em Dash —: alt shift -

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by alabastervlog on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:51PM (#43498029)
The default US English Mac keyboard is so extremely good, and has been the way it is for so long, that I remain baffled that other platforms haven't simply copied it. I came to it relatively late in life and it's one of the reasons I wish I'd started using Macs sooner.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by culi on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:47PM (#43498559)
It's pretty decent but the fact that I can't type an arbitrary unicode character has been a huge annoyance of mine since I switched from Windows/WSL to Mac.

They have shortcuts for Í, Î, and Ï but not for many commonly used characters like arrows

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by minitech on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:11PM (#43498778)
Control+Command+Space or Fn+E or Edit > Emoji & Symbols if you know the character’s name. It’s not very convenient for repeated use, but it gets the job done in a pinch.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by culi on Friday March 28, 2025 @04:38AM (#43502958)
Yeah it's not great. Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it. Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol

sigh

Thanks for the suggestions

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Aaron2222 on Friday March 28, 2025 @10:02PM (#43512074)
> Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it.

You can remap Fn/Globe directly to it if you want. It's also accessible from the Input menu bar item if you show that.

> Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol

Are you using the expanded Character Viewer window[0], or the default collapsed Emoji & Symbols pane[1]? Because the expanded Character Viewer lets you customise and reorder the categories[2] (though that doesn't affect search), including adding a full Unicode view[3]. And they both default to the search bar when opened (though the Character Viewer opens unfocused for some reason).

[0]: https://imgur.com/hTtrbcA

[1]: https://imgur.com/3L31DQu

[2]: https://imgur.com/Ch1PI5L

[3]: https://imgur.com/epayzwe

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Aaron2222 on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:12AM (#43501451)
You can add the "Unicode Hex Input" keyboard layout, which lets you enter BMP characters by holding down Option and entering its code point in hex (similar to the hex entry on Windows). Expanding the Emoji & Symbols pane minitech mentioned also lets you browse by category (e.g. arrows), and you can customise the categories and add a full Unicode character picker (not limited to BMP like the Windows Character Map) there as well.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by JimDabell on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:55AM (#43501982)
Aside from the solutions other people have mentioned, if you have often-used symbols, you can set up a text replacement in keyboard settings. For instance, I have :x: for the multiplication sign.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by kps on Friday March 28, 2025 @10:20AM (#43505774)
It's very easy¹ on MacOS to make yourself a custom layout with the characters you commonly use. Personally, I put arrows on ⌥⇧HJKL, vi-style.² (Doing so for Linux is a little more work, as xkb is more complicated and less capable.)

¹ https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

² https://codeberg.org/datatravelandexperiments/kps-keyboard-l...

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by agys on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:23PM (#43498350)
This specific key combination is not US keyboard specific. I like how they managed to group characters that are formally similar by binding them to the same keys.

Examples:

en and em are on -

Below are maybe Swiss specific?

~ is on N

@ is on G

| and \ and / are on 7

√ is on V

¥ is on Y and € is on E

∑ on W ( ∑ is a rotated W :)

etc.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by alabastervlog on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:31PM (#43498426)
Yeah, mostly the same on my US keyboard, except a couple like "@" (that's shift-2 on basically all US keyboards, and is printed on the key) and |/\, which are more prominent on US keyboards (two simply have their own keys, no shift modifier, even). I get the © symbol for option+g (which still kind-of makes sense!)

I appreciate that the designer of the layout clearly attempted to make some kind of mnemonic connection to the degree they could. Makes it easier to discover and remember the key-combos, even without a cheat sheet.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by agys on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:40PM (#43498505)
Ah! © is on C (makes sense!)
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by alabastervlog on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:35PM (#43499515)
That's c-cedille here, because to write English fluently you need to be able to type French loan words like façade—but not quite so often as someone in Switzerland, probably (especially so in some parts of the country!) so I assume you've got it somewhere even more prominent on your keyboard.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by jbverschoor on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:04PM (#43498709)
Except for international where € is opt-shift-2 (next to the pound/hash), next the to dollar

modifiers:

opt-e+letter é (acute/aigu)

opt-`+letter è (grave)

opt-i+letter û (circumflex)

opt-u+letter ü (umlaut)

opt-n+letter ñ (for the mañana)

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Eric_WVGG on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:48PM (#43498574)
my favorite example of this is ellipsis … opt-; (the key with the colon over the semicolon is sort of a rotated ellipsis)

thank you for teaching me √

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by heyjamesknight on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:09PM (#43498758)
I disagree—LLMs don't use them properly. They always put a space between the words before – and after – the dashed part.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Freak_NL on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:20PM (#43498852)
Using spaces is not wrong. Typographically, a hair space or another thinner than usual space is usually used, but in plain text a space is often preferred. Style guides vary of opinion on this, but newspapers often space them. Without a space they end up looking like elongated hyphens joining the words on both sides. That's not their function.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dragonwriter on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:02PM (#43499242)
> Using spaces is not wrong.

Its not wrong for en-dashes (and en-dash set open—with space on either side—is generally an alternative to an em-dash set closed.) And its not wrong on the trailing side of an em-dash used in dialogue to show an abrupt stop mid-sentence if the stop is followed by a new sentence. And there's a few other particular uses, but, generally, setting an em-dash open is wrong.

> but newspapers often space them.

I've never seen a newspaper set em-dashes open, but I have seen them use en-dashes set open instead of using em-dashes at all. Given the space premium in print newspapers, em-dashes set open, which would consume enormous horizontal space, would, other concerns aside, be an odd choice.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by bluebarbet on Thursday March 27, 2025 @06:51PM (#43499143)
This is US vs British English. You will struggle to find an em dash in any British publication.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Freak_NL on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:03PM (#43499254)
My comment was about spaces specifically. The Guardian and the BBC use en-dashes instead of em-dashes, but both do so with spaces.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by CRConrad on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @07:41PM (#43627536)
LLMs do use dashes "properly"; it could just as well be argued that you don't: The very article at the start of this discussion mentions that, while thy don't use spaces, using spaces is a valid alternative.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by op00to on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:51PM (#43498605)
My LLM prompts all have “don’t use em dashes or semicolons ever” when I send the output to someone else. ;)
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by lxgr on Thursday March 27, 2025 @08:59PM (#43500171)
I get not using em/en dashes, but semicolons don't really have an alternative in many cases (other than rephrasing), do they?
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by op00to on Friday March 28, 2025 @07:43AM (#43504147)
Usually I split it into two sentences, but yes. I don’t really see semicolons used in most business communications, so I treat them as a tell that the text was generated by LLM. Maybe I’m over reacting and prejudiced against semicolon usage.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by PartiallyTyped on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:53PM (#43498058)
On mac it's very easy to get an em-dash, just alt+shift+`-`. Though I do concur that it's more likely to come from an LLM, I don't think it should be considered a tell — I find it more of a predictor of the writer's age.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by salynchnew on Thursday March 27, 2025 @04:48PM (#43497995)
Most obvious tell of the former/current Stripe employee, imho.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by jsheard on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:34PM (#43498456)
What's the significance of Stripe here?
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by globular-toast on Thursday March 27, 2025 @05:28PM (#43498395)
(La)TeX would typeset -- as an en dash. --- gets you an em dash.

I, of course, used proper dashes in typeset documents, at least after I'd learnt about them in Knuth's The TeXbook. I have found myself occasionally use them in ASCII contexts just as ---. But I've never sought out the proper unicode character.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by toss1 on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:07PM (#43499275)
As a diligent user of ALT+0151 for many years on Windoes systems, I can contradict that it is a sign of LLM writing — perhaps in combination with other factors it can be used to increase the likelihood of LLM authorship, but alone, nope.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by ogurechny on Thursday March 27, 2025 @08:50PM (#43500092)
Just install a proper keyboard layout with proper typography support once.

It is maddening that the whole world uses typewriter keyboards with some facelift in the era of Unicode and even blasphemous full color emoji font rendering. What has changed in decades? Windows logo key, power keys, media keys, IE and Outlook logo keys — all Microsoft's fancies.

So initially IBM made some ad hoc decisions on what keys would be suitable for a single user office computer (as opposed to data input and admin terminals they had). Then everyone copied that, because sending unexpected scan codes could lead to bad things (random BIOS and program code couldn't care less about your ideas of forward compatibility). Then Windows became the “basic system” installed on most computers. Microsoft really pushed forward the internationalisation at the time, making a lot of national layouts and code pages (sometimes contradicting the national standards, for better or for worse). Then everyone copied what they decided. What's more important, even single byte code pages had the basic typographic symbols, anyone could've been using them for three decades, but they were not added to most physical keyboard layouts.

I wonder if that was because they wanted Word to seem more sophisticated than it was, and to make people think it was a requirement for “proper documents”, or because programmers still treated all non-ASCII symbols as free data markup constants that would “never appear in a regular text”.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by mmooss on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:34AM (#43501578)
> So initially IBM made some ad hoc decisions on what keys would be suitable for a single user office computer

Didn't it match ASCII and possibly typewriter keyboards?

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by dboreham on Friday March 28, 2025 @09:21AM (#43505129)
ASR-33 right?
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by shmerl on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:07AM (#43501429)
Compose - - - works for M-Dash (KDE / Linux).

For other combos — see /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

See also: System Settings > Keyboard > Key Bindings > Position of Compose key

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by scelerat on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:07AM (#43501430)
The Mac has had them as part of the standard keyboard layout since 1984. Using Apple kit since then, they have long been burned into my muscle memory:

option-[-] for en dash –

shift-option-[-] for em dash —

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by simondotau on Friday March 28, 2025 @08:06AM (#43504340)
The option key is IMHO the most underrated feature of the Mac platform. Having another modifier for character input is insanely handy, and I know where to find numerous characters like trademark™, divide (÷), pound (£), degrees (°), pi (π) and so on.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by phlakaton on Friday March 28, 2025 @12:34AM (#43501576)
I've been using real em- and en-dashes for decades, in more or less the way M-W describes. MacOS and iOS make it easy to do, and growing up Mac kindled a life of typographical nerdage.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by WhyNotHugo on Friday March 28, 2025 @06:24AM (#43503609)
Just configure something like RightAlt to work as a compose key:

Compose--- produces —

Compose--. produces –

Lots of other characters like áăǎ°±€ are available through compose: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2024/07/12/typing-non-english-...

> Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer.

Or just someone who likes to use the right characters. There was a report a few months back about how writing from autistic kids keeps getting mislabelled as LLM simply because they use the correct specific terms.

Please stop associating being precise with being an LLM.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by ryoshu on Friday March 28, 2025 @09:44AM (#43505370)
I'm married to an editor and friends with an editor at work. They both use em dashes appropriately—even with informal writing. I've now learned the keyboard shortcut just to confuse people in the age of AI slop.
Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by ubermonkey on Friday March 28, 2025 @10:29AM (#43505896)
Word and Outlook have replaced "hyphenhyphen" with an Em dash for decades.

Or, I mean, it does SOMETHING. I've never checked, and just always assumed I was getting the em dash.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by psunavy03 on Friday March 28, 2025 @11:08AM (#43506418)
It's pretty bonkers (and mildly depressing, really) to imply that correct grammar and usage is a reason to accuse someone of using an LLM.

I mean if it's an obvious break from their normal style, sure. But by itself? Every time I hear this argument, it just seems like sour grapes from poor writers.

Re:How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) by Quailman84 on Friday March 28, 2025 @11:08AM (#43506419)
For a while, em dashes were really popular among LLM enthusiasts because of the idea that it would encourage the LLM to draw from training data that contained em dashes—which typically were higher quality training data written by a professional writer or somebody with a professional editor. Subjectively, I think it worked. I suspect that the LLMs trained to be used as chatbots were finetuned to use the em dash liberally for that reason. Now, after a few generations of these models, I think that the em dash is starting to have the effect of drawing from "slop" training data that was written by other LLMs rather than well-written human data.