this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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You literally can just long press the normal hyphen on the iOS keyboard, probably similar in Android


So, you saw an em dash in a sentence and immediately screamed “AI!”? Hold up. That long, dramatic line — yeah, that one — has been around way before ChatGPT slid into your DMs. Writers have been using em dashes for centuries to spice things up, create vibes, and break the rules in the coolest way possible.

Here’s the tea: the em dash is a tool, not a tell. Just because an AI uses it doesn’t mean it’s some secret signature. You know who else uses em dashes? Literally every author who’s ever wanted to sound clever, casual, or just a little chaotic.

So next time you spot an em dash, don’t panic. It’s punctuation, not a personality test.

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[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yeah, but I do most of my long form writing on a keyboard, and I couldn't tell you how to type an em dash using a standard keyboard. I just googled it, "press and hold the Alt key while typing 0151 on the numeric keypad, and then release the Alt key", which doesn't seem to work. The fastest way I can find on a Windows 10+ PC is to hold win+. then use the mouse to click the symbols tab, then select —, which is not efficient and not obvious.

Yeah, On the phone it's easy, but I because it has never been readily accessible as a standard key on the keyboard, I have no idea when I would even use it. So I just googled that as well.

I think the EM dash is a good indication that someone has been writing something in a proper word processor like Word or some other document tool. Word at least has a way for you to configure a shortcut key for the symbol. Which, in turn makes it also as likely that the text was produced by a LLM trained on oceans of text containing em dashes.

I could use something like Autohotkey to do replace a triple dash (---) with an em dash, and a double dash (--) with an en dash, but no one else is going to think to do something like that.

If someone is using an em dash casually, it's just suspicious because it really isn't that easy to access and I don't believe (outside professional writers) that most people even know why they would use them.

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

on linux it's compose key then three hyphens
on mac it's shift + option + one hyphen

like this —

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago

Common Windows L.