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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W—R—O—N—G
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Hyphens read completely differently IMO
When I see the short dash like in your text it doesn’t read as a long pause to me but almost like you’re combining care-stop, it doesn’t have the same effect as –. I’ve seen them used in articles plenty before the rise of GPT text. I’m not sure it is necessarily a reliable tell for AI.
It’s really not. The emdash also auto changes in word if you use a - then type something.
Since I’ve started writing in markdown I have to do double-- to auto complete into emdash, but in word it’s coded in AFAIK
Not sure if you’re trolling, but that is an en dash, the middle child of the dashes. Used specifically for indicating ranges. E.g. year 1900–1902, numbers 0–9. The meaning is different from the slightly longer em dash
Ah thanks, I’m on mobile, I wasn’t sure which was the —em— on my keyboard, I don’t use any of these highfalutin text lines normally
I see it used in books pretty often, presumably because the text editors used for those have autocorrects for special characters like that and the ellipses character.
I was taught all the dashes in school along with all the other punctuation. Didn’t realize this was arcane knowledge. I also see them in books and other edited literature all the time. It is not obscure at all
I need an excuse to use my compose key