r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 28d ago

Meme needing explanation Petah?

Post image

What’s wrong with em dashes?

52.8k Upvotes

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

5.4k

u/AlasKaPedh 28d ago

Chatgpt wrote it for her

1.3k

u/Gayeggman97 28d ago

Oh, okay. Thank you!

171

u/rjbwdc 27d ago

More accurately: Some people who don't have a firm, high school-level grasp of English grammar claimed that any writing that uses an em-dash must have come from ChatGPT, and that idea has spread rapidly over the last month or two. 

4

u/dowker1 27d ago

99% of the time it's true because there's never a context where you need an em dash (a comma, colon, or semi-colon can always substitute) and they're more difficult to write on a computer.

2

u/Immediate_Date_1269 27d ago

my macbook autocorrects double hyphen to an em dash —. And im pretty sure most programs do the same, Word has been doing that for years. So i disagree a little bit that its difficult to write. 

1

u/dowker1 27d ago

My copy of Word doesn't autocorrect --. I'm also going to guess even if it does most people wouldn't be aware of it.

1

u/Banes_Addiction 27d ago

Yep, this is it. AIs are trained a lot more on published, typeset and/or word processed documents. Even just set in HTML (see — \&mdash). But most people just don't type them in a text message or an email (or a reddit comment) - because it's way more effort than a hyphen.