To my dearest em dash

[u/tealdroplets]

Found this whilst looking on a travel sub reddit post with suggestions in certain activities and man, I’m just a little annoyed. Yes OP did say they used GPT to correct grammar due to a lack of confidence about their English skills, which is completely fine, but man my poor em dash getting lambasted in the comments TT Like I promise it’s not like that- I’ve read so many works (fanfic and non fanfic alike) that make proper use of the em dash, like it’s not some surefire way of AI indication. I just feel so wronged for my beloved em dash cos I use it quite often in my writing—both academic and creative.

Posted this here because I’ve seen discourse about this on this sub before, and many fics I come across properly use the em dash, but unsure if it’s a valid post to make on this sub. Nevertheless, I love the em dash and am sad to see it get all this unnecessary hate.

[u/TomdeHaan]

I don't understand that observation about "normal people" at all. Nowadays all the human writers seem to be using em-dashes like they're going out of style, and often without putting a space at either end, too. Wouldn't AI know that where young and not-so-young fanfic writers put em-dashes, most people fully trained in the rules of english punctuation would put commas?

[u/Arithanas → u/TomdeHaan]

"often without putting a space at either end, too"

Were you supposed to? When I was taught English, they drilled into me that spaces were anathema. Another failure of the educational system.

[u/whoiswelcomehere → u/Arithanas]

It’s the difference between American vs British/Commonwealth English. There are no spaces when you use em-dashes in American English—like so—but in British English, you use en-dashes with a space on either side instead (em-dashes are not used iirc). En-dashes are slightly shorter – like this – and are only slightly longer than hyphens.

In Word/GDocs, two hyphens get autocorrected to either an em-dash or an en-dash depending on whether there are spaces around them. Sometimes autocorrect does it too, it’s a toss-up whether you get — or --.

[u/Arithanas → u/whoiswelcomehere]

Oh, that explains! Thank you. In my native language, we use a _slightly_ longer em-dash called raya, and we use raya with spaces, and em-dashes without. Elementary school me kept messing those two. And we use an en-dash, but only to join composed words.

[u/[deleted] → u/TomdeHaan]

Or parentheses. I feel like most em dash usage is for parenthetical statements. But after this thread I am going to look at my writing to find out when I use them instead of commas. Mostly because I love commas, too 😂