Em Dash

[Black_Mage]

I was listening to the latest WAN show episode while at work today, and I had no idea what the heck Luke was talking about when he mentioned that A.I. uses something called an Em Dash when composing stuff. This is despite the fact that I took English classes in high school and college. I had to look it up. Thanks, @Slick! I learned something new today. 

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use

[Deeezy]

I started using them after a professor was pretty insistent about them. I remember that part in WAN too and now that I think about it AI does use that a fair amount in it's generated text lol

[Spotty]

Do you have the timestamp for the discussion on the WAN show? Or what topic it was part of. I'm interested in watching it.

 

Edit: It's part of the Tik Tok AI segment (3:01:00). Discussion on Em Dashes starts around 3:25:00

 

Edited June 24, 2025 by Spotty

[Bitter]

I use them all the time in write ups for work, it's a more visual separator than a comma which is easily skipped in the font our system uses when printed. 

For example something like...

Located break in wire near harness loom located near L/F corner of engine - repaired break in wire - reloomed harness - tested system and found it fully functional at this time. 

Sometimes I'll use them to break sections in a line then use commas to list items in a section like...

Rear brake job needed - will require pads, rotors, hardware, as well as bleed rear brakes due to fluid age.

 

They're really useful. Unfortunately my writing style, cadence, and mixed adjective use ends up making it sound like it's been written by AI sometimes. 

[Spotty]

47 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I use them all the time in write ups for work, it's a more visual separator than a comma which is easily skipped in the font our system uses when printed. 

For example something like...

Located break in wire near harness loom located near L/F corner of engine - repaired break in wire - reloomed harness - tested system and found it fully functional at this time. 

Sometimes I'll use them to break sections in a line then use commas to list items in a section like...

Rear brake job needed - will require pads, rotors, hardware, as well as bleed rear brakes due to fluid age.

 

They're really useful. Unfortunately my writing style, cadence, and mixed adjective use ends up making it sound like it's been written by AI sometimes. 

Do you use the hyphen symbol (-) like you wrote in your post or do you use the actual em dash symbol (—)?

 

From what I see it's not common for people — outside of professional writers — to write using em dash characters. The em dash symbol isn't on keyboards — it's not very intuitive to use while typing. To type it you need to enter the alt code (alt+0151) or use writing software that will automatically insert the character for you in place of other symbols. MS Word and Libre Office Writer will insert it if you type two hyphens -- between two words. 

 

47 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Located break in wire near harness loom located near L/F corner of engine - repaired break in wire - reloomed harness - tested system and found it fully functional at this time. 

I would personally write that as a bullet point list — though, if the software you're writing with doesn't allow for formatting bullet point lists or line breaks I can understand using a dash as an informal separator.

• Located break in wire near harness loom located near L/F corner of engine
• repaired break in wire
• reloomed harness
• tested system and found it fully functional at this time. 

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, Spotty said:

The em dash symbol isn't on keyboards — it's not very intuitive to use while typing.

Depends. On macOS it's Option+Dash to write an en dash and Option+Shift+Dash to write an em dash. On Gnome I can instead use Right-Alt to get characters like – — … ×

[Spotty]

28 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Depends. On macOS it's Option+Dash to write an en dash and Option+Shift+Dash to write an em dash. On Gnome I can instead use Right-Alt to get characters like – — … ×

I don't use MacOS, so I didn't know that, but that's good to know. That's a little easier than using the alt code on Windows but I doubt most people are taking the effort to use the character and will probably just use - instead.

Do you ever use the em dash? I'm curious how many people actually use the character when writing, especially in more casual writing like social media/forum posts.

 

Luke is correct in that the em dash character is very common in AI (LLM) outputs. Once you start noticing it you'll start spotting it in a bunch of social media posts and realising they're AI generated. It's like the equivalent of spotting 6 fingers on a hand to spot AI generated images in older image generating AI models.

A significant amount (but not all) of the AI generated posts we receive on the forum are posted by spammers. Been seeing a lot of em dahes in posts by spammers lately. 

 

As I was writing this a spammer posted this... 

Even though it's only two sentences it still managed to squeeze an em dash in there. AI really loves using them.

[Eigenvektor]

8 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Do you ever use the em dash? I'm curious how many people actually use the character when writing, especially in more casual writing like social media/forum posts.

I do, but very rarely. A character I use much more often would be the ellipsis…

[Bitter]

8 hours ago, Spotty said:

Do you use the hyphen symbol (-) like you wrote in your post or do you use the actual em dash symbol (—)?

 

From what I see it's not common for people — outside of professional writers — to write using em dash characters. The em dash symbol isn't on keyboards — it's not very intuitive to use while typing. To type it you need to enter the alt code (alt+0151) or use writing software that will automatically insert the character for you in place of other symbols. MS Word and Libre Office Writer will insert it if you type two hyphens -- between two words. 

 

I would personally write that as a bullet point list — though, if the software you're writing with doesn't allow for formatting bullet point lists or line breaks I can understand using a dash as an informal separator.

• Located break in wire near harness loom located near L/F corner of engine
• repaired break in wire
• reloomed harness
• tested system and found it fully functional at this time. 

Oh I thought it was just a hyphen, I wasn't paying super close attention but I use hyphen in place of actual em dash.

 

Our software has a limited number of vertical text lines per entry to bullet points would eat one whole line in that section and make the print out several sections and pages longer. Additionally sometimes the software doesn't recognize that a section is too long causing it to print endless blank pages. The software was originally coded before Windows 3.1 and has been modified repeatedly to keep working under Windows since then leading to some oddities like it's own keyboard shortcuts that overlap Windows keyboard shortcuts. 

[Bitter]