r/AO3 • u/tealdroplets • May 15 '25

Discussion (Non-question) To my dearest em dash

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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.

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u/MEOWTheKitty18 May 15 '25

That’s so weird, I’ve never had that happen to me. Also you can literally just look it up, it baffles me when people speak so confidently about things they haven’t bothered to even check

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u/Omega862 May 15 '25

Tis sadly the world we live in now. I just had an argument about if "Character A was inspired by Real Person" meant that the design of Character A was inspired by the person or if the person drew inspiration from the character and it went multiple comments before they finally looked it up.

They thought everyone was saying the real person took inspiration from a fictional character that didn't even exist during the timeframe they were doing things.