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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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Programmer Humor
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They’re useful—especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons; I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
There you go. It's easier, clearer, and less pretentious.
Okay, but you've just created a sentence fragment, which is fine unless you were trying to use complete sentences.
Fragments are wrong in elementary school grammar, yes. In the real world, they're used by Charles Dickens and other sophisticated writers intentionally.
Did I not say “which is fine”?
I use them when connecting a thought in between another thought—for example, what I just did right now—and then returning back to the original thought. I use a semicolon when connecting two related thoughts together*; LLMs tend to only use one em-dash, so I'm hoping that by using two of them instead—and a semi-colon instead whenever an LLM would use an em-dash—there will be no confusion as to whether or not I'm human.
I use them with a space on each side -- which is apparently wrong. Sigh.
I like to alternate between sets of em dashes and sets of parentheses to obscure the fact that I'm using too many "asides" in my writing.
I do that too on top of everything else I said. It's an ADHD thing. I write how I think, with lots of tangents.
Fuck, dashes, embrace, Hegel.