I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.
I'm not reading most conversations on Outlook or Word, so explain how they do it on reddit and other sites? Are you suggesting they draft comments in Word and then copy them over?
I don’t think there’s a need to use Word. On iOS, I can trivially access those characters—just hold down the dash key in the symbols part of the keyboard. You can also get the en-dash that way (–) but as discussed it’s less useful in English.
I don’t know if it works on the Finnish keyboard, but when I switch to another Scandinavian language it’s still working fine.
On macOS, option-dash will give you an en-dash, and option-shift-dash will give you an em-dash.
It’s fantastic that just because some people don’t know how to use their keyboards, all of a sudden anyone else who does is considered a fraud.
On an iOS device, you literally just type a dash twice and it gets autocorrected into an emdash. You don’t have to do anything special. I’m on an iPad right now, here’s one: —
And if you type four dashes? Endash. Have one. ——
“Proper” quotes (also supposedly a hallmark of LLM text) are also a result of typing on an iOS device. It fixes that up too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Android phones do this too. These supposed “hallmarks” of generated text are just the results of the typographical prettiness routines lurking in screen keyboards.
Fair point! I am talking about when people receive Outlook emails or Word docs that contain em-dashes, then assume it came from ChatGPT. You are right: If you are typing "plain text in a box" on the Reddit website, the incidence of em-dashes should be incredibly low, unless the sub-Reddit is something about English grammar.
Follow-up question: Do any mobile phone IMEs (input method editors) auto-magically convert double dashes into em-dashes? If yes, then that might be a non-ChatGPT source of em-dashes.
Mobile keyboards have them, desktop systems have keyboard shortcuts to enter them. If you care about typography, you quickly learn those. Some of us even set up a Compose key [0], where an em dash might be entered by Compose ‘3’ ‘-’.
