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

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650 points Stratoscope | 2 comments | 27 Mar 25 20:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.544s | 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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op00to ◴[27 Mar 25 21:51 UTC] No.43498605[source]▶
My LLM prompts all have “don’t use em dashes or semicolons ever” when I send the output to someone else. ;)
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1. lxgr ◴[28 Mar 25 00:59 UTC] No.43500171[source]▶
I get not using em/en dashes, but semicolons don't really have an alternative in many cases (other than rephrasing), do they?
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2. op00to ◴[28 Mar 25 11:43 UTC] No.43504147[source]▶
Usually I split it into two sentences, but yes. I don’t really see semicolons used in most business communications, so I treat them as a tell that the text was generated by LLM. Maybe I’m over reacting and prejudiced against semicolon usage.