this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Yes, it's nuanced but it breaks up the sentence flow in a different way. Also used for listing things. A comma is more a small pause, like this. A semicolon is used to differentiate two independent related thoughts ; it's kind of a combination between a period and a comma. A dash can be used for many things - a longer separating of thoughts, listing different points such as this, or just as an intentional emphasis to add a more protracted pause.
Your comment has a hyphen not an em dash. The point of the post is that AI likes to include em dashes, which are wildly uncommon in modern text, as most keyboards don't have a key for it
They’re pretty trivial to make in any OS — having a dedicated key isn’t necessary.
Sure. Most people don't know what an OS is, let alone how to enter special characters.
I think this is something macOS does best — using shift+option hyphen is a bit quicker than alt+0151.
Long pressing the hyphen on the Google keyboard on Android also gives the option of selecting an en dash or em dash.
On Linux, if you have the compose key enabled, Compose key + three hyphens in a row will generate an em dash (en dash is two hyphens).
…well I’m definitely turning that on for my Linux machine then. Thanks for the tip.
It's convenient for a lot of things. Curly quotes, specialized dashes, mathematical symbols or Greek letters used in math/science, foreign currencies, things like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§), etc.