Are 'em dashes' a put off simply because AI uses it a lot?

[Juia_Darkcrest]

Maybe as a continuation, but I've never seen a semicolon used as an insert in the middle of a sentence... or maybe I drank that memory away?

He had been a spacer for nearly thirty years; the entire operation had been almost hardwired into his brain at this point.

 

[HarryGarland]

I was just re-reading the first book of Harry Potter. Lookey what I found, em-dashes. And a semi-colon.

Quoted from the book:

​

“Anyway — Harry,” said the giant, turning his back on the Dursleys, “a very happy birthday to yeh. Got summat fer yeh here — I mighta sat on it at some point, but it’ll taste all right.”​

(I marked this to learn how to do punctuations when dialogue and description are sandwiched together. And lots of em-dashes.)​

“Ah, shut up, Dursley, yeh great prune,” said the giant; he reached over the back of the sofa, jerked the gun out of Uncle Vernon’s hands, bent it into a knot as easily as if it had been made of rubber, and threw it into a corner of the room.​

(A semicolon!)​

I don't know which edition this one belongs to. And I'm not sure if the first edition had em-dashes or not.

I think dislike towards em-dashes simply because AI uses it is more subjective rather than objective.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

IMO

Nah, even before a.i., its always been trash.

And you know what?

The hobbit wasn't a very good book.

There i said it.

Saying it wasn't enjoyable is fair, but saying it wasn't good is nonsense. I admire the craftsmanship of Moby Dick, even if I couldn't stay awake through the second chapter, and The Wyrm Oroboros though I can't make it through seven chapters. Both are just tedious slogs, despite being well-written.
Heck, there are parts of The Lord of the Rings that drag interminably, but overall it is a great book (Tolkien planned it as a single book with six sections, his publisher turned it into the three books most of us know today), and The Hobbit is, though written for a younger audience, a better book overall than LOTR itself (his short fiction was even better, in general).

 

[Anonjohn20]

a better book overall than LOTR itself

That second and third chapter of The Hobbit was like watching paint dry.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

That second and third chapter of The Hobbit was like watching paint dry.

So was the first chapter of Moby Dick, and the second didn't seem much better so I bailed. Doesn't mean it's a bad book, just was not a good book FOR ME; I didn't like it, but the thousands, maybe millions who did are not wrong in calling it great, even if it can also be used as a form of torture.

Or, if you want another example, take Henry Jame's Portrait of the Lady. Please ... Er I mean... 400 pages of ...nothing really. Girl meets two guys, loves both of them, goes with the one she knows has money and connections. Guy pretty much locks her inside when he's out on business - about 40% of the time. When he's home, he's either sweet and doting, or a drunken monster, about 50/50. She hurts him badly after about 300 pages of this and flees. Back home. Where the other guy was waiting. And, it turns out, he had more money THEN than the "rich guy" does now - and has only grown his wealth. So she's going to go with the guy she actually liked better, but not because she likes him; because he's rich.... Ugh.
But enough people love the book that I can't just dismiss it as the utter rubbish it felt like to me (also because Henry James wrote some splendid shorter fiction, like A Turn of the Screw)... but only made it through because the teacher was also my academic advisor, and one woman in the class was gorgeous and sometimes seemed interested...

 

[HungrySheep]

I used them because the Monogatari series used them. You can type them naturally by holding down Alt and then hitting 0151 on the numpad. —

 

[LastMinami]

I used them because the Monogatari series used them. You can type them naturally by holding down Alt and then hitting 0151 on the numpad. —

I might be wrong, but are you referring to the series by the mythical, the legendary, Koyomi Araragi?

 

[rainchip]

I’ve been using the em dash since my fanfic days LOL. Periods, commas, colons, semicolons. They’re all excellent tools. But sometimes I feel like people get turned off by the semicolon because it reminds them of writing a school project. The emdash just slides right by.

 

[HungrySheep]

I might be wrong, but are you referring to the series by the mythical, the legendary, Koyomi Araragi?

By NISIOISIN, yeah.

 

[MFontana]

What do you think of em dashes in a novel's text?

Personally, I find em dashes quite stylistic. It adds variety to the punctuations we already know: periods (.), commas (,), question (?) and exclamation marks (!), colons (:), semicolons (;) and the simple dash (-). A paragraph with multiple compound sentences that were punctuationed with just periods and commas are... Not as aesthetically pleasing as one with dashes.

What do you think?

First, a little nitpick.
The "simple dash" is referred to as a hyphen.
Now, on to the question itself.
I don't ever use them. Never have. Probably never will.
Because I don't like them. That, likewise, is just my own personal opinion, and there certainly is a time and place for them in literature.

I didn't really like them (EM & EN Dashes) before AI was a thing, and I can't really see that changing now, especially with how frequently (badly) AI tends to try to use them.

 

[Anonjohn20]

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but AI didn't kill the em dash; keyboards did. If you look down at your keyboard, there isn't an em dash key, so you must use a code as HungrySheep does. See:

I used them because the Monogatari series used them. You can type them naturally by holding down Alt and then hitting 0151 on the numpad. —

This is the primary reason why the other forms of separating clauses have become way more popular than the em dash.

 

[Juia_Darkcrest]

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but AI didn't kill the em dash; keyboards did. If you look down at your keyboard, there isn't an em dash key, so you must use a code as HungrySheep does. See:

This is the primary reason why the other forms of separating clauses have become way more popular than the em dash.

Honestly, this is probably the most obvious answer.

When you're actually typing, not 'hunt and peck' typing, switching to a keyboard command sucks... I'd rather just use something else.

I still think AI uses them way more than people ever have. /shrug

 

[Anonjohn20]

way more than people ever have.

... the em dash was the most common way to separate clauses in history. Reading medieval texts, you'll see them a lot. While English speakers started to use commas in the 18th century, Spanish speakers (especially in South America) kept spamming em dashes all the way until the 20th century.

 

[Dawnathon]

The real problem is that em dashes are solely a stylistic choice. There's no place they can be used that they couldn't be substituted by parentheses, semicolon, or even commas, depending on the context. They don't actually do anything specific to them besides taking up more horizontal room to make sentences seem longer. The sole exception I've seen is using them as a way to mark a character's being interrupted mid-word.

 

[LastMinami]

... the em dash was the most common way to separate clauses in history. Reading medieval texts, you'll see them a lot. While English speakers started to use commas in the 18th century, Spanish speakers (especially in South America) kept spamming em dashes all the way until the 20th century.

What can we say? Hispanic culture is always educating others.

 

[Saltzilla]

I dislike EM Dash's typically, but they do have their place if used sparingly. I think the issue with AI is that it spams them across the entire chapter, and that shows as lazy writing. It saw that EM dash can be used to replace of a lot of punctuation and overused it, whilst a real person would still use normal punctuation and use EM Dash to emphasis thought or point.

 

[Anonjohn20]

What can we say? Hispanic culture is always educating others.

Not about education. Refusing to change always has external factors. After calling a history friend of mine, he informed me that countries that printed texts with the printing press used em dashes a lot, while texts written by hand or by typewriter (later in history) used the other symbols. So I amend my earlier statement and now claim that the computer did not kill the em dash; the typewriter did.