The Art Of Not Asking Why

They’ve been sneaking up on me again in my own writing, and I’ve been trying to catch them, changing them to colons. That’s alright, for the most part, it kinda works. Kinda.

And then this guy¹ came along:

colons are so nearly useless — they are the same width as a comma and unlike periods they don’t change the register of the following letter. Em dashes are of a clearly different length. And most colons are better off as em dashes to delineate different parts of the sentence.

The problem with Em dashes these days is AI, of course. Sasha has an answer for this as well:

I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

I’ve been using regular dashes as em dashes for years before I even knew they’re called em dashes (and then realized that I’ve been using regular dashes wrong) and thanks to this guy I learned how to do that on a Mac, and now it’s going to live in my Emacs too: — in org-mode will become em-dashes in a new dwim function I just made².

So yes, someone, at some point, would point to posts and blame me for spewing AI-made content:

“But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes? Fine, you do, okay, fair enough. Then I’ve got you covered: use AP-style em dashes, these are separated from the text by spaces instead of being glued to it. That’s how every em dash in this piece is styled — and it’s unlike AI em dashes which are “like—this, word—word”.

So I’ve been using AP-style em dashes the whole time? Turns out I did!

They are about the width of a capital letter M, and always get a space on either side, except in sports agate.

And while I’m there and venting about AI and em dashes, they mention this too:

It’d be nice if there was an easy tell (if something is written by AI or not - JTR). Unfortunately, that tell is not the em dash, which has been around for many years. In fact, they are so ubiquitous in AP lingo, we just call them dashes.

OK then, I feel vindicated enough. Sorry Em dashes, it’s been too long.

Oh, and while I’m on my AI soap box, let me vent about yet another thing that AI is actually messing up for me: commas.

I don’t care if I need a comma before “you know” and “too” and “ok” in a sentence like this one here ok?

Footnotes

“I don’t care if I need a comma before “you know” and “too” and “ok” in a sentence like this one here, ok?” with that comma before the ok, I’d break the flow. It makes you take a pause, as if the “OK” is its own thought almost, but it’s not. It’s part of the whole sentence before it, just as I’d say it. I don’t care if it’s grammatically correct, it’s not JTR correct. So screw that. Thanks but not thanks.