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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: 0.001s | 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. necovek ◴[27 Mar 25 21:39 UTC] No.43498490[source]▶
While this is true, this is an amazingly silly omission.

Serbian and Croatian XKB keyboard layouts have had em- and en-dashes since early 2000s even if they were not standardized: AltGr (right Alt) + hyphen (to the left of right Shift) produces an em-dash, and press Shift on top, and you get an en-dash.

This is how long I've had them easily accessible on any keyboard (I even have them converted to MacOS keyboard layouts for use with Karabiner).

http://srpski.org/dunav/raspored-c.html