I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don’t think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, “he’s coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning,” as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, “he’s coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning.”
I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it’s a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated
Dashes, of all kinds need to fucking die, die, die.
While not completely fair, my burning hatred of dashes comes for word processing applications automatically replacing hyphens and especially double hyphens in code with dashes. And this never gets caught until said code needs to be copy-pasted back into a functional application, and it fails. Sometimes in weird and horrible ways. So, while it’s the auto-replace which causes the problem, the existence of dashes is proximate enough that they all need to be burned out of existence for all time.
You’ve given me a horrible flashback to the time I took two hours to figure out that some code wasn’t working because someone else’s copy/paste had, somehow, introduced a few zero-width spaces that I did not think to check for
But yes, I agree that using just one character for all three of those would be fine for general purposes and easier in specific fields. I think I’d prefer the en dash to be the default since it’s the middle ground size, but to be honest as long as we don’t need to start using em dashes as hyphens for very—wide—compounds I’d be happy
Em dashes are supposed to be padded with something like a half-space on either side. Some computer systems do proper kerning and will space them out automatically if you don’t manually add spaces, but most don’t do it. Like you, I would just add full spaces because em dashes practically touching the words is bullshit.
oh no I apparently feel very strongly that you’re wrong here
You’re right that m-dashes should be spaced, of course. But there’s a big difference between an m-dash and an n-dash, and you used the wrong one in your example. An m-dash, like a semi colon or colon, is for separating two related clauses — there’s never at time when you should use two in the same sentence. Whereas n-dashes are used for parantheticals –sub-clauses that can’t stand on their own– and should, like round brackets or quotation marks, have spaces on the outside but not the inside.
I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don’t think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, “he’s coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning,” as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, “he’s coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning.”
I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it’s a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated
Dashes, of all kinds need to fucking die, die, die.
While not completely fair, my burning hatred of dashes comes for word processing applications automatically replacing hyphens and especially double hyphens in code with dashes. And this never gets caught until said code needs to be copy-pasted back into a functional application, and it fails. Sometimes in weird and horrible ways. So, while it’s the auto-replace which causes the problem, the existence of dashes is proximate enough that they all need to be burned out of existence for all time.
You’ve given me a horrible flashback to the time I took two hours to figure out that some code wasn’t working because someone else’s copy/paste had, somehow, introduced a few zero-width spaces that I did not think to check for
But yes, I agree that using just one character for all three of those would be fine for general purposes and easier in specific fields. I think I’d prefer the en dash to be the default since it’s the middle ground size, but to be honest as long as we don’t need to start using em dashes as hyphens for very—wide—compounds I’d be happy
Em dashes are supposed to be padded with something like a half-space on either side. Some computer systems do proper kerning and will space them out automatically if you don’t manually add spaces, but most don’t do it. Like you, I would just add full spaces because em dashes practically touching the words is bullshit.
oh no
oh no I apparently feel very strongly that you’re wrong here
You’re right that m-dashes should be spaced, of course. But there’s a big difference between an m-dash and an n-dash, and you used the wrong one in your example. An m-dash, like a semi colon or colon, is for separating two related clauses — there’s never at time when you should use two in the same sentence. Whereas n-dashes are used for parantheticals –sub-clauses that can’t stand on their own– and should, like round brackets or quotation marks, have spaces on the outside but not the inside.