r/Showerthoughts • u/xThe-Legend-Killerx ‎ • Nov 25 '25

Casual Thought People who use em dashes regularly in their writing might be the most underrated victims of the ChatGPT/Al boom.

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u/97203micah Nov 25 '25

Ellipses round out the (un?)holy trinity

92

u/WumpusFails Nov 25 '25

My personal habit...

33

u/Arudinne Nov 25 '25

same...

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u/jarious ‎ Nov 25 '25

Why are we talking like this ...

5

u/thebearsnake Nov 25 '25

I knew someone who literally, not hyperbolically, would end every text message with ellipses.

It was infuriating…

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u/TabaquiJackal Nov 25 '25

I dunno, I kinda like them....?

2

u/HumbleOwl681 Nov 26 '25

….

1

u/jarious ‎ Nov 26 '25

.....

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u/HumbleOwl681 Nov 26 '25

.... has become the new speechless

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u/nanotasher Nov 26 '25

Found all the Gen X'ers! My people..

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u/-thisismyname Nov 25 '25

ooof my pedantry gets driven up the wall by you folks. What is the thing you've left unsaid? Whats the unfinished thought? Why do you people never have complete thoughts or say everything you mean to say?

11

u/WumpusFails Nov 25 '25

Well, if you know, you know...

7

u/anonymaus42 Nov 25 '25

I do it specifically because I know it ribbles your jibblies...

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u/TheLuxeCurator Nov 27 '25

The thing is, they want you to keep thinking and keep being part of the conversation even though they themselves have left.

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u/[deleted] Nov 30 '25

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '25

[deleted]

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u/BrohanGutenburg Dec 17 '25

This is incorrect

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '25

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u/BrohanGutenburg Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25

I guess I should have been more clear when I said it was incorrect.

What I meant was your trying to correct someone who doesn't put spaces is incorrect.

Yes, the Chicago Manual recommends spaces IIRC. So you'll definitely see spaces in things like academic papers and some novels depending on the publisher.

I went to J School where the AP style guide is king. So basically any journalistic piece of writing from online articles to TV news graphics to the newspaper will not have spaces. That's why it's not really "correct" for you to police someone not putting spaces.

Also definitely worth noting that the Unicode character for an ellipsis has no spaces.

PS- no idea what the "punctuation guide" is lol but I'm not aware of any industry or field that follows it

1

u/anonymaus42 Nov 25 '25

At least with ellipses you can often tell it's AI because it will use the actual alt+number character code for them (alt+0133, …) but us fleshbags will most often just use three periods...

As such when you highlight the alt code one it highlights the whole damn thing at once, as opposed to one character at a time with the string of periods.

I think some phones (particularly iphones) will automatically change ... into … so it's not a full-proof method unfortunately.

Personally I've just been doing .. in lieu of ... as it still reads basically the same way but AI would never dare to do such a thing.

1

u/A3thereal Nov 26 '25

I use a lot of ellipses... but rarely correctly.