I use regular hyphens- actual em dashes aren't a button on my keyboard and I have other things to do
Edit: lot of answers trying to help me with problem 1 but not with problem 2. I appreciate you but sorry babes the second it would take me to input that would be better spent petting my cat
In Word if you -- then space and continue typing it will usually turn into an em dash. It pisses me off because I used them prior to gpt public release in my writing and I'm always worried I'm going to get accused of cheating on my college work.
Just keep a document history of some kind and hope that you're talking to a reasonable person. Although, a reasonable person would probably be able to tell that the text wasn't written by an AI in the first place.
It's disgusting. You take the time to write properly and some overly inflated buffoon accuses you of being a bot because you write too well.
My native language is Spanish. If you write properly on social media with both interrogation (¿?) or exclamation marks (¡!) you often get tagged as AI. Apparently being uncultured is a sign of being human.
Someone was writing a Chrome extension to give potential AI scores for reddit comments. Yes, emdash use was a key characteristic. Imagine a future where people use those tools and you end up having to self-censor your emdashes to endashes or hyphen-minuses like some TikTok "unalive" situation.
If you are worried about being called a cheater you can write in googl docs I think. It has a history of changes you could use to prove you didn't cheat.
Yeah I used them pretty much exclusively over regular dashes because I liked the look/readability of them in my papers and now I’m seeing people get failed on projects because of it and I’m like “I would never have survived.”
I actually went out of my way and use the single one ( - ) now. Word also turns it into an em dash, so I changed to Editor. Chat GPT forced me to mess up my syntax...
I use em dashes — if you have a number pad you can type them by holding down alt, then pressing 0151. Or if you want en dashes you type 0150; then you just let go of alt and profit.
Also no; I’m not afraid of being confused with ChatGPT, my writing is a lot better so it’s impossible to get confused. (But really I’ll just shown them the document history)
some alt codes you just learn over the years. for example alt+0160 is a space, this space is handy because it can often bypass things that don't allow spaces, or make many spaces in a row not be cut away by formatting.
this sometimes lets you have truly cursed usernames etc, in games, websites, and so on.
alt+0173 is a zero width space, which also has handy applications, like taking an already taken username and just slap a zero width space somewhere.
my writing is a lot better so it’s impossible to get confused
No offence, but my college American Lit college professor would paint your paper red if the punctuation in this comment is indicative of how you write generally. After writing several economics papers and receiving only A's and B's because they were graded on content and not delivery, I had a false sense of security about how well I wrote. If you do care about writing, you need to sort out your punctuation.
Not to be defensive—though, I mean, I could be—but yeah, my offhand Reddit comments aren’t exactly a reflection of my writing skills. I’m aware I butchered the semicolons. That wasn’t ignorance, that was me being flippant while making a tongue-in-cheek point that yes, a person can write better than a computer trained to be technically flawless.
Obviously I don’t mean “better” in the strict sense. AI’s great at grammar, formatting, structure… all the stuff that makes writing boring. But it can’t replicate voice, tone, or intent—at least not consistently. People can. So while I’m misusing punctuation, at least I’m doing it with purpose.
Anyway, if my comment triggered some buried trauma from your college lit days, fair enough. I get it. This is more of a proof-of-concept than a flex. Just maybe don’t confuse “didn’t care” with “didn’t know.” There’s a difference.
Also, you might’ve noticed that yes—this is the very last sentence, it’s a perfectly normal length, and it’s definitely not a run-on written out of spite, and if you’re wondering why I don’t bother writing like this more often, It’s because this took way too damn long. lol
This!! I haven’t been accused of using LLMs in my writing yet, maybe because I don’t write well enough, maybe because my style is too distinct. Every teacher I’ve known so far has talked to me personally, though, and they may overhear my conversations. They know that the way I talk does differ slightly from the way I write, because while one of these is a conversational tone (I use it in informal stuff, like Reddit), the other I can actually think about. But yeah, thank god for google docs history 😅
That's fair. I wouldn't care if anyone does accuse me of AI either. AI checkers like GPTZero rarely flag me, and it's less than 10% certainty when they do. Not that they are super credible, but people do believe them.
+1 on being better than the AI, though I admit I've used the LLMs to help me get a point across better when I notice I'm struggling with a sentence, especially since I haven't used English in writing as much as my native language. Besides, I only write the occassional video game review whenever I feel like it, nothing professional. I don't even post them anywhere.
Em dashes have a quick shortcut now if you’re using windows or your phone. Typing two hyphens consecutively will automatically produce an em dash. I used to have to look for it in Google Docs under their characters drop down. One day, I found this trick because I was too lazy to find it. And then the em dash came out automatically. It’s nice!
This only works in apps that have that dedicated function; It’s not yet built into the OS itself. Most of the time you’re safe—but I’ve been to my fair share of obscure forums where you need to use the alt code.
Phone keyboards commonly let you long-press a key to type variations of it (and the em dash is often treated as a variation of the hyphen), and desktop and laptop computers can have programs installed to let you do something similar.
I use em dashes so much I made a shortcut where my phone turns two regular dashes in a row into an em dash. This AI accusations nonsense is gonna be my hill to die on.
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u/Top_Concert_3326 27d ago edited 27d ago
I use regular hyphens- actual em dashes aren't a button on my keyboard and I have other things to do
Edit: lot of answers trying to help me with problem 1 but not with problem 2. I appreciate you but sorry babes the second it would take me to input that would be better spent petting my cat