Normal people (myself included) are not particularly good at writing and would never use an emdash. The average person won't even use semicolons because of confusion about how to use them and at least those have a dedicated key.
I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.
Then you're throwing out a lot of babies with your bathwater: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
I'm not prolific enough to rank on this leaderboard, but I often use the em dash in comments/posts/texts and have for years—especially on my phone, since it's easiest to reach from a mobile keyboard.
I grew up ob forums where em-dashes and semicolons were fairly common—Harry Potter roleplay forums! In fact, that's how I learned most of my English; probably where some of my expression style developed.
Em-dashes are a great way to signal something—thought or extra context—were inject into normal sentences flow. It can make the text appear more conversational
I realise Harry Potter roleplaying forums are not really your "normal" crowd though lol
Honestly em-dashes are simpler to use than other punctuation and sometimes come in handy when it's not clear what to use.
Why are they not in widespread use, though?
AACK!
Because parentheticals—as aside, explanation, enumeration—aren't taught and we are left to learn them by example, and not many people care enough about writing style to pick up on them and want to use them. Ask most people who don't deal with technical writing about the Oxford comma and they likely won't care, if they know what it is in the first place.
I will admit I'm more like to use "--" and not bother converting it if not done automatically on quick forum posts. You can find examples in my post history. But I come across them all the time in written works.
Many of us who use em-dashes are so used to Word/etc correcting -- to — that it's just part of normal typing. I'm find if it renders either way, but I use -- in writing all the time.
One day this whole thing is going to read like the 1980's where you could tell if a latter was written by a "real" typist and not a word processor by the lack of correction liquid/tape.
But this is the problem, if you type double “-“ on iOS, it just turns it into an emdash. (“—“)
Honestly — starting with the word honestly also seems like an LLM tell.
> I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.
All of this is distracting from the real question, which is:
Why do you care if it was AI generated?
As long as my comment reflects what I intended to say, you shouldn't care if I wrote it or the AI wrote it. Did it offend you in the past if an HN commenter used Grammarly to help craft the comment?
This is the literary equivalent of an ad hominem attach.
Because many people use LLMs to generate the thoughts and not just to tidy up grammar. And they don’t critically think about it.