- writers use emdashes
- ai learns how to write from writers
- people who don’t write think emdashes signify ai writing
how are we supposed to help these people?
So, here are the stats of my blog. 60% of my posts had at least one emdash 1 in 2015. You either accept I had invented a capable LLM in 2015, or that using emdash is a normal thing people who write often do.
| year | posts | posts with em dashes | share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 18 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 2004 | 109 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 2005 | 256 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 2006 | 371 | 1 | 0.3% |
| 2007 | 543 | 1 | 0.2% |
| 2008 | 541 | 3 | 0.6% |
| 2009 | 150 | 1 | 0.7% |
| 2010 | 181 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 2011 | 94 | 1 | 1.1% |
| 2012 | 50 | 3 | 6.0% |
| 2013 | 85 | 14 | 16.5% |
| 2014 | 44 | 13 | 29.5% |
| 2015 | 33 | 20 | 60.6% |
| 2016 | 18 | 8 | 44.4% |
| 2017 | 6 | 1 | 16.7% |
| 2018 | 23 | 1 | 4.3% |
| 2019 | 4 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 2020 | 20 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 2021 | 16 | 2 | 12.5% |
| 2022 | 6 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 2023 | 7 | 2 | 28.6% |
| 2024 | 15 | 1 | 6.7% |
| 2025 | 64 | 13 | 20.3% |
| 2026 | 64 | 20 | 31.2% |
| all | 2718 | 105 | 3.9% |
-
In the early days, I often used a simple dash (“-“), instead of a proper
—(“—”) because content management systems would get confused by the html entity representation. The stats count these cases as “emdash” too. ↩