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How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

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650 points Stratoscope | 1 comments | 27 Mar 25 20:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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A_D_E_P_T ◴[27 Mar 25 20:41 UTC] No.43497927[source]▶
AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: --

Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.

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1. layman51 ◴[27 Mar 25 21:11 UTC] No.43498231[source]▶
That’s interesting to note. I have usually taken the time to properly use en-dashes when it seems appropriate because I frequently deal with strings that represent academic years. At least where I live, these span two calendar years. I have noticed that a lot of college websites tend to use the en-dash properly (e.g. on their academic calendar webpages).