Hear hear! Also, from the faculty perspective, it irks me no end that all this AI whatnottery forces me to spend far more than an iota of an atom of a second second-guessing the lovely prose of students whom I generally presume are honest and well-intentioned, simply because occasionally one of their peers will turn in something in a style so dissimilar from earlier work that the reason seems obvious. And then nagging doubts creep in. Every new tool for plagiarism and cheating creates new problems, but this one is particularly insidious because it's not strictly plagiarism and thus much harder to prove. And also because I WANT my students to be beautiful writers. And I WANT them to be striving for that. And I WANT to believe in them. And I hate that this "tool" is causing them to doubt their own capacity to learn so much that they stifle their own process.
The "was"/"were" thing interests me because it's sometimes presented as the "loss/death of the subjunctive" as if we'd somehow lost the ability to talk about unreal conditions. (In these discussions, the fact that only the verb "to be" can show this distinction is not usually brought up, though in fact we can hypothesize about situations that involve many other verbs.)
Vernacularly, "was" seems to rule, as sung by Paul Simon in "Loves Me Like a Rock": "If I was the president ...".
In a slightly more formal context, Gabe Fleisher, the political writer, had a column on June 1 that he titled "What if Donald Trump was Prime Minister?" Had I been editing (<- he said of an unreal condition), I would have suggested "were", but would have accepted the Argument of Authorial Preference. Either way, it's clear that DJT is not Prime Minister. (Thank goodness)
True confession. I'm a retired writer and editor (of the legal kind), I even taught the subject for several years, and it wasn't until late in my career that I learned there were different kinds of dashes. Turns out I'd been using a hyphen where an en-dash would go and an en-dash where an em-dash was proper. As for the em-dash, it never made an appearance. I didn't know it existed.
Did I change my ways on discovering the wider dash world? No. I kept right on doing what I was doing. It just didn't seem to make that much difference to me. As far as I could tell, using the wrong dash didn't bother my readers and didn't interfere with the clarity of my prose. I'll die on the split infinitive hill (sorry, Benjamin, I know you disagree), and I'm fussy about the subjunctive, too, but I just couldn't (and can't) get worked up about dashes.
Cheryl, I was also thrilled by the distinction made between writers (who may or may not publish, and, if published, may or may not make money), and the whole idea of "content creators." When I hear the word "writer," I imagine someone who is trying to figure something out, wants to engage in conversation with others about something, or has a story they want to tell. When I hear the phrase "content creator," dollar signs pop into my mind. Period. Nothing wrong with wanting to make money, but the motivation does not tempt me to pay attention.
Interesting. As one who makes copious use of dashes - em and otherwise - I was disturbed by the premise of this piece, and relieved to learn that it's BS. I'm currently reviewing a second copy edit, making the noted corrections as I go, of a 450 page tome redolent with dashes, so the prospect of the finished product (please, God ... it's been such a long haul) being perceived as derived from AI is depressing, to say the least.
I'd never considered that a two-word combo like "humans appeared" could be a complete sentence, but can't think of a reason why it shouldn't be ... so I guess it is. Go figure.
Thanks, as always. Your posts are as entertaining as they are informative, which I very much appreciate.
Michael: I can think of lots of two-word sentences. Jesus wept. Birds sang. Stars appeared. He smiled. She laughed. They kissed. Both sighed. Maybe you were thrown off by the the lower case "h" in original version?
And now I am imagining a a short story (very short) comprised entirely of two-word sentences. I am so easily distracted!
I can report from the world of online copyeditor groups that the majority of people claiming to practice the trade are confused about the difference between a dash (a punctuation mark) and an em dash (a typographic glyph) and get themselves into a tizzy over the stylistic—nay, grammatical!—difference, as if there were any, between an em dash and an en dash. Please support my campaign to retain the categorical distinction: a dash can be nothing more than a pencil line or a spaced typewriter hyphen. When text is composed into type, the dash can be expressed as an em dash set solid (the usual choice in US books), a spaced en dash (the usual choice in UK books), or any of several other possible choices at the direction of the publisher or the designer, without any difference in meaning. The en dash set solid, which you so expertly deploy, is, as one wag put it, a hyphen with a college education. But it's still, in punctuation terms, a hyphen. Okay, I'll step down off my soapbox now.
U.S. copy editors—at least the copy editor I’ve been and all the copy editors I’ve ever worked with—should agree without hesitation on the differences between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, without ambiguity or confusion (and I’ve never met any or worked with any who don’t get how it works). And an en dash is most certainly not a hyphen, otherwise it would be a hyphen and not an en dash. 🤷🏻♂️
I wonder if some of this is generational. I came of age as a writer using an Adler manual typewriter, only graduating later to an IBM Selectric. I can't recall many dash options, if any, on those devices. I believe one formed a dash using two hyphens, and that was that. By the time I had a laptop (by the time there even was such a thing) and began using word processing, I was well past school age.
Sure, we were all of us, when we were typing on typewriters, typing two hyphens to indicate a dash (and we none of us knew what an en dash was anyway; only copy editors know what en dashes are). But once you learn how to type in Word (or on your phone, or etc.), it’s pretty simple to figure out how to summon up what you actually want:
I think I understand your phrase "...and the letter t" in the body of the post as a joke, but then I stumbled on your "...how ti works)" in the comment above. Typo for "it" or did I miss something about "t" in editing?
Thank you for the posts. Unlike your Sallie, I'm an old dog learning new trix.
"Dashes—which isolate, highlight, emphasize—serve ... " should have been, "highlight, emphasize, and allow some writers to produce 64-word sentences—serve ..."
It saddens me so much to see people flailing around with the punctuation of their own language, because it indicates that they haven't read good books. Punctuation usage isn't learned by rote, it's picked up from reading Maupassant, Trollope, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Maugham, Conrad, ad infinitum--older writers, not modern writers who experiment with language for effect. And this em dash nonsense is just tedious. Em dashes are everywhere in literature, as common as semicolons, and I won't even get started on that. The intrusion of AI into creative writing is scrambling people's brains.
A bit of caution is called for. If you stretch back too far, you encounter punctuation styles that have fallen out of favor. Tastes change. An example: These days, it's unusual to find a simple SVO sentence in which a comma separates subject from verb. In the seventeenth c., it was common. Another: Capitalization was much more widespread even seventy years ago than it is today: Office titles (the US—excuse me, the U.S.—had Presidents, not presidents, and so did corporations); seasons (Spring was respite from Winter); departments and institutions (Bob, Jr. [always with the comma] was majoring in Government at the University). But mainly, your point is well taken about reading good books.
I upgraded my subscription to “paid” because this post reminded me how much I loved every minute I spent reading your book. Thank you for sharing your wit, wisdom, and humor.
It’s a great post! (Yours, that is!)
❤️
Uh-oh! Right off the bat, you’re upset at a thinking light bulb—I fear what’s next.
Oh, I get it! Ems! (But why not dicks?)
If using em dashes is an AI tell, I'm in deep 'bot-do.
Wa diddy diddy dum diddy doo
But hey! In a Trumpic world without education, who will need to write essays? Problem solved.
Hear hear! Also, from the faculty perspective, it irks me no end that all this AI whatnottery forces me to spend far more than an iota of an atom of a second second-guessing the lovely prose of students whom I generally presume are honest and well-intentioned, simply because occasionally one of their peers will turn in something in a style so dissimilar from earlier work that the reason seems obvious. And then nagging doubts creep in. Every new tool for plagiarism and cheating creates new problems, but this one is particularly insidious because it's not strictly plagiarism and thus much harder to prove. And also because I WANT my students to be beautiful writers. And I WANT them to be striving for that. And I WANT to believe in them. And I hate that this "tool" is causing them to doubt their own capacity to learn so much that they stifle their own process.
The "was"/"were" thing interests me because it's sometimes presented as the "loss/death of the subjunctive" as if we'd somehow lost the ability to talk about unreal conditions. (In these discussions, the fact that only the verb "to be" can show this distinction is not usually brought up, though in fact we can hypothesize about situations that involve many other verbs.)
Vernacularly, "was" seems to rule, as sung by Paul Simon in "Loves Me Like a Rock": "If I was the president ...".
In a slightly more formal context, Gabe Fleisher, the political writer, had a column on June 1 that he titled "What if Donald Trump was Prime Minister?" Had I been editing (<- he said of an unreal condition), I would have suggested "were", but would have accepted the Argument of Authorial Preference. Either way, it's clear that DJT is not Prime Minister. (Thank goodness)
I asked my editor to change something from dash to a parentheses to make it feel more intimate and am now feeling smugly Dreyerian about it.
Ice creamy …
I had a bit of a gasp when I read "If Howard Hughes...." I braced. Please "were"! Whew! Thanks.
True confession. I'm a retired writer and editor (of the legal kind), I even taught the subject for several years, and it wasn't until late in my career that I learned there were different kinds of dashes. Turns out I'd been using a hyphen where an en-dash would go and an en-dash where an em-dash was proper. As for the em-dash, it never made an appearance. I didn't know it existed.
Did I change my ways on discovering the wider dash world? No. I kept right on doing what I was doing. It just didn't seem to make that much difference to me. As far as I could tell, using the wrong dash didn't bother my readers and didn't interfere with the clarity of my prose. I'll die on the split infinitive hill (sorry, Benjamin, I know you disagree), and I'm fussy about the subjunctive, too, but I just couldn't (and can't) get worked up about dashes.
Except, maybe, DoorDash
Touché!
Winning sentence: The people I know are writers, not content creators.
The winning paragraph (inarguably the most delightful), begins: “Not only utterly commonplace…”
Suprahonorable mention: Tom Hardy screenshot from *Fury Road* [edited; I can't believe I misattributed so grossly]
Cheryl, I was also thrilled by the distinction made between writers (who may or may not publish, and, if published, may or may not make money), and the whole idea of "content creators." When I hear the word "writer," I imagine someone who is trying to figure something out, wants to engage in conversation with others about something, or has a story they want to tell. When I hear the phrase "content creator," dollar signs pop into my mind. Period. Nothing wrong with wanting to make money, but the motivation does not tempt me to pay attention.
Interesting. As one who makes copious use of dashes - em and otherwise - I was disturbed by the premise of this piece, and relieved to learn that it's BS. I'm currently reviewing a second copy edit, making the noted corrections as I go, of a 450 page tome redolent with dashes, so the prospect of the finished product (please, God ... it's been such a long haul) being perceived as derived from AI is depressing, to say the least.
I'd never considered that a two-word combo like "humans appeared" could be a complete sentence, but can't think of a reason why it shouldn't be ... so I guess it is. Go figure.
Thanks, as always. Your posts are as entertaining as they are informative, which I very much appreciate.
Michael, thank you! Entertaining + informative = what I strive to do. (Be.)
And best of luck with the tome!
Michael: I can think of lots of two-word sentences. Jesus wept. Birds sang. Stars appeared. He smiled. She laughed. They kissed. Both sighed. Maybe you were thrown off by the the lower case "h" in original version?
And now I am imagining a a short story (very short) comprised entirely of two-word sentences. I am so easily distracted!
Maybe not technically a story, but it still tells one!
I can report from the world of online copyeditor groups that the majority of people claiming to practice the trade are confused about the difference between a dash (a punctuation mark) and an em dash (a typographic glyph) and get themselves into a tizzy over the stylistic—nay, grammatical!—difference, as if there were any, between an em dash and an en dash. Please support my campaign to retain the categorical distinction: a dash can be nothing more than a pencil line or a spaced typewriter hyphen. When text is composed into type, the dash can be expressed as an em dash set solid (the usual choice in US books), a spaced en dash (the usual choice in UK books), or any of several other possible choices at the direction of the publisher or the designer, without any difference in meaning. The en dash set solid, which you so expertly deploy, is, as one wag put it, a hyphen with a college education. But it's still, in punctuation terms, a hyphen. Okay, I'll step down off my soapbox now.
U.S. copy editors—at least the copy editor I’ve been and all the copy editors I’ve ever worked with—should agree without hesitation on the differences between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, without ambiguity or confusion (and I’ve never met any or worked with any who don’t get how it works). And an en dash is most certainly not a hyphen, otherwise it would be a hyphen and not an en dash. 🤷🏻♂️
I wonder if some of this is generational. I came of age as a writer using an Adler manual typewriter, only graduating later to an IBM Selectric. I can't recall many dash options, if any, on those devices. I believe one formed a dash using two hyphens, and that was that. By the time I had a laptop (by the time there even was such a thing) and began using word processing, I was well past school age.
Sure, we were all of us, when we were typing on typewriters, typing two hyphens to indicate a dash (and we none of us knew what an en dash was anyway; only copy editors know what en dashes are). But once you learn how to type in Word (or on your phone, or etc.), it’s pretty simple to figure out how to summon up what you actually want:
a - or a – or a —
I actually d/n know this! I've bn using 2 hyphens because I never knew I cd long-hold the hyphen key to get a choice! Okay, dinosaur here.
I think I understand your phrase "...and the letter t" in the body of the post as a joke, but then I stumbled on your "...how ti works)" in the comment above. Typo for "it" or did I miss something about "t" in editing?
Thank you for the posts. Unlike your Sallie, I'm an old dog learning new trix.
(Typo.) (Fixed.) 🙏🏻
I vote for the spaced en-dash. Rule, Britannia!
"Dashes—which isolate, highlight, emphasize—serve ... " should have been, "highlight, emphasize, and allow some writers to produce 64-word sentences—serve ..."
A mere 64 words? I can barely clear my throat in a mere 64 words.
Sadly, no patch on Molly Bloom …
It saddens me so much to see people flailing around with the punctuation of their own language, because it indicates that they haven't read good books. Punctuation usage isn't learned by rote, it's picked up from reading Maupassant, Trollope, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Maugham, Conrad, ad infinitum--older writers, not modern writers who experiment with language for effect. And this em dash nonsense is just tedious. Em dashes are everywhere in literature, as common as semicolons, and I won't even get started on that. The intrusion of AI into creative writing is scrambling people's brains.
A bit of caution is called for. If you stretch back too far, you encounter punctuation styles that have fallen out of favor. Tastes change. An example: These days, it's unusual to find a simple SVO sentence in which a comma separates subject from verb. In the seventeenth c., it was common. Another: Capitalization was much more widespread even seventy years ago than it is today: Office titles (the US—excuse me, the U.S.—had Presidents, not presidents, and so did corporations); seasons (Spring was respite from Winter); departments and institutions (Bob, Jr. [always with the comma] was majoring in Government at the University). But mainly, your point is well taken about reading good books.
I upgraded my subscription to “paid” because this post reminded me how much I loved every minute I spent reading your book. Thank you for sharing your wit, wisdom, and humor.
Thank you, Michael, that’s so kind!