Confession: I consider the em dash to just be “the dash, but pretentious” and have always hated how useless and lame it feels so I’m thrilled it’s become a hallmark of ChatGPT and people who use it are attacked as bots
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So completely and catastrophically wrong. The em dash is simply a better semicolon. It has the impression of thrusting forward—the eye is pushed along to the next clause. The semicolon is like running into a wall; the eye needs to leap over it to continue. Both have uses but em dash is often better.
The em dash shouldn’t even be compared to the semicolon, it should only be compared to the standard dash that does everything em dashes do but is faster to find on a standard keyboard
The em dash is just two dashes! If you use a standard dash like an em dash, you need to separate it with spaces to differentiate it from hyphenated words - this is in fact three key-clicks instead of two!
You’re talking to a person who uses caps lock instead of shift to capitalize their letters because I am better at pressing three buttons consistently than two buttons at the same time. Way faster to hit space twice than dig through my phone keyboard for an em dash 😜
I went on a witch hunt for these when I read about it over on substack and then was promptly informed that the iPhone automatically converts two dashes to the em dash and that the entire substack platform defaults to convert single dashes to em dashes.
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I still don’t like them though
I'll never forget this. For a while. Never might have been a stretch. Listen... I'll do my best 😅🙏