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Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

Am I… AI? I do use ellipses and (what I now see is) en dashes for punctuation. Mainly because they are longer than hyphens and look better in a sentence. Em dash looks too long.

However, that’s on my phone. On a normal keyboard I use 3 periods and 2 hyphens instead.

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Sternhammer@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’ve long been an enthusiast of unpopular punctuation—the ellipsis, the em-dash, the interrobang‽

The trick to using the em-dash is not to surround it with spaces which tend to break up the text visually. So, this feels good—to me—whereas this — feels unpleasant. I learnt this approach from reading typographer Erik Spiekermann’s book, *Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works.

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- mr_satan@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  My language doesn’t really have hyphenated words or different dashes. It’s mostly punctuation within a sentence. As such there are almost no cases where one encounters a dash without spaces.
  
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  - Sternhammer@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Sounds wonderful. I recently had my writing—which is liberally sprinkled with em-dashes—edited to add spaces to conform to the house style and this made me sad.
    
    I also feel sad that I failed to (ironically) mention the under-appreciated semicolon; punctuation that is not as adamant as a full stop but more assertive than a comma. I should use it more often.
    
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    mr_satan@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I rarely find good use for a semicolon sadly.
    
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  - elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    What language is this?
    
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    mr_satan@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Lithuanian. We do have composite words, but we use vowel, if necessary, as connecting sounds. Otherwise dashes usually signify either dialog or explanations in a sentence (there’s more nuance, of course).
    
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tmpod@lemmy.pt ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’ve been getting into the habit of also using em/en dashes on the computer through the Compose key. Very convenient for typing arrows, inequality and other math signs, etc. I don’t use it for ellipsis because they’re not visually clearer nor shorter to type.

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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Compose key?
  
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  - tmpod@lemmy.pt ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
    
    It’s a key that makes the next 2 or more keystrokes be dead key inserts that combineinto some character otherwise impossible to type.
    
    In my case, my keyboard had a ≣ Menu key which I never used, so I remapped it to Compose.
    
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