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How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-)
(www.merriam-webster.com)
Step 1: be a bot
I love the emdash—I use it all the time! And ofc I always use an endash to denote ranges. My first name is hyphenated too
So do i—the emdash is one of my favorite characters. I never use the endash, though.
Nice! Do you ever use two hyphens together in the place of an em dash?
On macos I know how to insert them using opt+hyphen (endash) and shift+opt+hyphen (emdash). I need to figure out how to get that on linux. Thankfully I think obsidian renders -- and
as en dash and em dash so I use them in my notes, and typst does as well.
If I can't easily do it I'll usually use -- in place of an emdash and I'll just use a hyphen for where I'd use an endash.
I also just know the html code by heart so in placesi can use html like in markdown I'll just use – and — (yeah... they remove the leading e to make it shorter haha)
thank you. This is really useful information :)
a dash here
a dash there
spice up your life
idgi, is it like an llm thing?
There was a post a while back claiming only bots post using em dashes.
I have the answer: do you want a dash? Type a dash.
Which one? Idk, it's on the keyboard, do I look like I have the fucking time for three different kinds of dashes?
They're little lines, and you're alive now, not forever. Do the right thing and don't give a fuck.
If you're self editing it's worth learning the use, even if you don't use some of them. The en dash I've largely ignored myself, it doesn't seem to be used much in fiction nowadays.
Totally overuse em dashes! I have to edit out a lot of them.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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