I very rarely even see em dashes in regular text. I wouldn’t know how to type them on neither my PC nor my phone (the latter at least not intuitively) anyway. I always use -, and assumed en and em dashes were only used in books and such, where you also use lots of different fonts, sizes, »« instead of „“/“”, etc. If you truly want an artistic pause that is longer than ‘-’… just use …
In English, distinguishing those two symbols has become an affectation. The straight "" style is all anyone actually types, and it’s unremarkable to see that style rendered or printed.
The length of a dash is even less important than that. Any style guide that’s insistent about it might as well demand you type movie names in a different font. Can it be done? Sure. Does it have semantic value? Maybe. But the only people who’d care also know how to pronounce LaTeX.
This is the language that abandoned an entire letter because it was hard to print.
I use em-dashes a lot, I just hit the ?123 button on the bottom left side of my phone keyboard and long-press the hyphen. The thing is, I use em-dashes where a human would use them, I don’t sprinkle them on like sentence enhancers
I very rarely even see em dashes in regular text. I wouldn’t know how to type them on neither my PC nor my phone (the latter at least not intuitively) anyway. I always use -, and assumed en and em dashes were only used in books and such, where you also use lots of different fonts, sizes, »« instead of „“/“”, etc. If you truly want an artistic pause that is longer than ‘-’… just use …
I’ve always used em dashes when writing casual speech style writing like internet comments, I find it helps things flow a bit better at times.
It’s a little annoying that people now see it as an AI tell, but I’ve not been called one yet
They’re trained on scientific writing, and we em dashes all the time in scientific writing.
I use them all the time. Long press the dash - on the phone keyboard, or COMPOSE - - - on Linux.
The em dash as a concept is a relic. People now communicate those uses with a dash between spaces, or with two dashes.
It’s like worrying which direction your quotation marks curl. They don’t.
It’s not worrying, it might be foreign to you.
»« is the style of direct speech markers used in German book setting. It’s basically mirrored from the French style, who use «»
„“ is the style used in German handwritten texts and quotations
“” is the English style for direct speech and quotations
In English, distinguishing those two symbols has become an affectation. The straight "" style is all anyone actually types, and it’s unremarkable to see that style rendered or printed.
The length of a dash is even less important than that. Any style guide that’s insistent about it might as well demand you type movie names in a different font. Can it be done? Sure. Does it have semantic value? Maybe. But the only people who’d care also know how to pronounce LaTeX.
This is the language that abandoned an entire letter because it was hard to print.
I use em-dashes a lot, I just hit the ?123 button on the bottom left side of my phone keyboard and long-press the hyphen. The thing is, I use em-dashes where a human would use them, I don’t sprinkle them on like sentence enhancers
- – —Oh yeah
Dash, double dash and triple dash (that’s at least what I’d think intuitively)