I'm seeing lots of writers confirming they use em dashes for today's #WritersCoffeeClub
First - YAY! Fellow em dash lovers!
Second - People really need to diversify their reading if so many of us confirm that we use them, only for people to use em dashes as a sign it was written with AI.
Also, are people forgetting that AI is trained on real people's writing—if AI uses em dashes, it's because real writers use them, not the other way round.
Overheard:
Teens doing homework: “I like em dashes because you don’t have to have a run-on sentence, but can add a fun little nugget of info to your sentence”
@immarisabel As a fellow em-dasher—you betcha I em—seeing your blog delighted me, having been told mere weeks ago by a fellow author that it was a hallmark of AI writing and it is being used less, which left me sad. I use it extensively in my fiction as I never shy away from a long continuing thought sentence when it's the write way to say what I mean. The author said they were soldiering on, and well they should; so should we. Good writing—even with em-dashes—differentiates itself from mediocre averaging-the-mean AI drivel. The thing about AI is that it pattern matches—it discovers trends because it is incapable of reasoning, meaning its use of the em is because people commonly write using it! Maybe what's popular are em parentheticals, or the em abrupt end—? Of course AI uses the word Is a lot. Maybe we should stop using that?
I even use the em-dash for signature lines.
—R.S.
Again, thanks. I boosted your post to my followers.
#emdashes #emdash #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writer #author
😴 Software engineer debates the existential crisis of—wait for it—missing em dashes. Because clearly, the punctuation apocalypse is upon us, and who needs scalable cloud applications when your prose lacks dramatic flair? 📉
https://bassi.li/articles/i-miss-using-em-dashes #SoftwareEngineer #PunctuationCrisis #EmDashes #DramaticFlair #TechHumor #HackerNews #ngated
Learn the tells of AI writing: em dashes, rule of three, bullet points, and more.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=0lmGvlbBoFNyCoHG&v=9Ch4a6ffPZY&feature=youtu.be
#AIwriting #GenerativeAI #WritingStyle #LLMs #AIwritingStyle #Shibboleths #RuleOfThree #EmDashes
Working on a sort of (very very) simple #SolarSystem #Civ type game. Just in #linux #terminal for now, because much easier for me. Learning a lot about #python and the importance of indentation.
Makes me want to create a #programming language that uses #EmDashes, #EnDashes, and #hyphens. Just because.
- function
– blah
— blah blah
Planets revolve around the sun, ships travel between planets. basic resource use and collection.
This piece makes the good point that "suspicion of the em dash also speaks to our mounting paranoia over automated communication" — we know there are people passing off AI crap as their own writing, and we want to be able to spot it. But the em dash "cannot be a reliable metric of AI reliance for the simple reason that it is a case of the software mimicking *human* writing patterns."
h/t @raganwald
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-hypen-em-dash-ai-writing-1235314945/
I've been writing using em dashes since the 1990s. The reason AI uses em dashes is because it was trained on my writing, and that of countless other humans like me.
How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use
#HackerNews #EmDashes #EnDashes #Hyphens #Grammar #WritingTips #Language
