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Notes -
I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.
I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.
Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.
I always use all of the various hyphen forms. It got drilled into me in legal writing. Since some poorly written legislative codes include hyphens (e.g., "section 1-a" instead of "1(a)"), it's important for readability of citations to always distinguish between hyphens and en-dashes. And I was always taught separating a clause with em-dashes was for important elaborations, while parentheses were for asides that weren't necessarily vital to the meaning of the sentence. This seems a useful enough distinction to keep the em-dash in my repertoire, despite the AI connotations.
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