They’ve been sneaking up on me again in my own writing, and I’ve been trying to catch them, changing them to colons. That’s alright for the most part; it kinda works. Kinda.

And then this guy1came along:

…colons are so nearly useless — they are the same width as a comma and unlike periods they don’t change the register of the following letter. Em dashes are of a clearly different length. And most colons are better off as em dashes to delineate different parts of the sentence.

The problem with Em dashes these days is AI of course. Sasha has an answer for this as well:

I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

I’ve been using regular dashes as em dashes for years before I even knew they’re called em dashes (and then realized that I’ve been using regular dashes wrong) and thanks to this guy I learned how to do that on a Mac, and now in my Emacs too: --- in org-mode will become em-dashes in a new dwim function I just made2.

So yes: someone, at some point, would point to my posts and blame me for spewing AI-made content. I already confessed I use AI to edit and polish my posts, and also:

“But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes? Fine, you do, okay, fair enough. Then I’ve got you covered: use AP-style em dashes, these are separated from the text by spaces instead of being glued to it. That’s how every em dash in this piece is styled — and it’s unlike AI em dashes which are “like—this, word—word”.

So I’ve been using AP-style em dashes the whole time? Turns out I did!

They are about the width of a capital letter M, and always get a space on either side, except in sports agate.

And while there, I saw they mention AI too (because how can you not):

It’d be nice if there was an easy tell (if something is written by AI or not - JTR). Unfortunately, that tell is not the em dash, which has been around for many years. In fact, they are so ubiquitous in AP lingo, we just call them dashes.

OK then, I feel vindicated enough. Sorry Em dashes, it’s been too long.

Oh, and while I’m on my AI soap box, let me vent about yet another thing that AI is actually messing up for me: commas.

I don’t care if I need a comma before “too” or “ok” in a sentence like this one here ok?

If I were to write: “I don’t care if I need a comma before ’too’ or ‘ok’ in a sentence like this one here, ok?” with that comma before the ok, it will break the flow. And I like my grumpy flow.

It makes you take a pause, as if the “OK” is its own thought almost, but it’s not. It’s part of the whole sentence before it, just as I’d say it. I don’t care if it’s grammatically correct — it’s not JTR correct. So screw that. Thanks but not thanks.

Footnotes

1: I have a lot to say about not liking this guy being on Substack, but every now and then there’s someone who writes something I like in a place I don’t like, so instead of bitching about it I just bite the bullet. Also, Sasha offers writing classes for money (I feel like shelling out $175 an hour is a bit much, but that’s me), so it kind of works.

2: org-mode can export to markdown, so why do I need a function in dwim to do it through pandoc? Because org-mode’s markdown exporter is based on its HTML exporter, which converts those to HTML numeric code. This is fine if you export to HTML and open with a browser, but if you export to a markdown file or a temporary markdown buffer (as I do to copy into Micro.blog’s app), it will just show the code, and then I have to find them all and replace them and it’s annoying and cumbersome.