em-dashes

I've decided to double down on em-dashes.

I'd used them, but sporadically, in my writing pre-LLMs. But I think I never really saw their full power, so just dipped into them here and there.

That changed in the last few months, but first there was a twist in the hero's journey. All of a sudden LLM writing had a significantly noticable use — and what some would even consider an overuse — of em-dashes.

So came out of the woodwork the surface-level pattern matchers, the midwits who see an em-dash — the same sort of midwits who cry about the "useless" use of cat — and start screaming "Aha, gotcha!". To avoid unnecessary banter I just started avoid using em-dashes.

I've now realized two things — just like how I realized with the cat midwits — there is an infinite supply of them — the midwits — and that their presence should not have a bearing on my actions, well, at least not too much.

But more importantly: that I was underusing em-dashes, and LLM have shown me the way.

The thing I struggle most with when writing, including now, is how to linearize my thoughts. My thoughts, as are yours, like branches of a tree, sprawling around as far as they can go to catch the most sunlight they can — but on the written page one word follows the other. There are ways to deal with this — commas, colons, semicolons, parentheses — but still it is not easy. Some people are better at it, which is why they are better writers, since they can show a tree to someone as a line; but I'm not particularly great, and I need all the help I can to help me linearize my thought, and what LLMs have discovered is that em-dashes are particularly good for this.

Go forth, em-dash with abandon.

Pro tip: On macOS, Shift+Option+- inserts an em-dash.