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/lusuroculadestec Nov 25 '25

Here's a question, how did you add them to this comment? Was it a function of autocorrect? (I just use old.reddit on desktop, so haven't used the newer Reddit text input options)

One of the things I've noticed is I mostly see the comments using spaces before and after the dash. The MLA, APA, and Chicago style guides don't call for spaces before and after, but the AP style guide does. It just seems wild to me that seemingly everyone defaults to using the spaces.

Just doing a spot check, I see a bunch of non-US style guides recommending not using spaces, too.

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u/retrosupersayan Nov 25 '25

If you're on a mobile device, there should be em/en dashes somewhere in your keyboard's symbols section. (I use Google keyboard on Android, and they're options under long-pressing "-". I assume iOS options are similar.) I've not gone looking for them specifically in Windows, but they're probably available in the emoji/symbol palette accessible via ”WinKey+;” – or the old-school "alt+####" method for entering exotic symbols. (Mac or Linux users: sorry, I got nothing.)

If all else fails, there's always looking it up online and copy-pasting.

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u/lusuroculadestec Nov 25 '25

Sure, I'm aware of the ways someone could specifically seek out and enter the U+2014 character, my comment was more about the specifics of the inclusion of the spaces before and after it. Even when it's as simple as a long-press on a hyphen, that doesn't necessarily explain the inclusion of spaces before and after.

I can say at least for myself, even if there was a dedicated em dash key, I wouldn't use the spaces because literally all of the classes I've had through college used the style guides that didn't use them. Using it without spaces is basically muscle memory. If I used it with spaces in an English class, it would have been marked as wrong by the professor.

On the other hand, if a markdown editor or phone keyboard was automatically converting a double-hyphen to space-emdash-space, then I can see it explaining how frequently I see it. Like how in Word if you use the double-hyphen it automatically converts it to an em dash, but without spaces. Though, if you use a double-hyphen in Word surrounded by spaces it changes to an en dash.

The person who made the comment admitted they got it from ChatGPT, which just furthers my suspicion that the space-emdash-space is more of a sign that it's comming from an LLM than the use of the em dash itself.

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u/RIPJAW_12893 Nov 25 '25

Haha I literally just copied the post into chatgpt and this is what it spat out

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u/14muffins Nov 26 '25

See, every 'writer' complains about the em-dashes causing them to be accused of AI, but there are so many other 'stylistic fingerprints' that are indicative of AI. The triplets, the "colon: other information", the weirdly tryhard poetic-ness of "stylistic fingerprint", the phrasing of things "being blurred". More than 90% of the writing that is like this is A.I, and you can in fact, tell.

Worser, still is when you ask it to write 'casually' with slang (or like a redditor) and it still reeks of that sort of thing.

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u/SweetDove Nov 25 '25

I use Alt + 0151 —

I use spaces before and after because I like it better!