I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don’t think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, “he’s coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning,” as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, “he’s coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning.”
I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it’s a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated
I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don’t think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, “he’s coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning,” as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, “he’s coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning.”
I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it’s a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated