this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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As a long time fan of the em dash, it is truly a tragedy that using it is associated with AI. I was heavily using it before LLMs were a big thing. It allows spacing in contexts where commas and others just won't let you. Am I to just incorrectly use a hyphen instead? Horrible 0/10
Speaking as a Brit: using a capital letter after a colon or a semi-colon just looks weird to me. I'm continuing a thought, not starting another mid-sentence. Using an em-dash - or even just a hyphen, I think it's an acceptable alternative when you've not got adequate input available - lets me show a slight change of thought mid-sentence in a trans-Atlantic way.
Also, fuck AI.
Funny. I'm German, and in German it's actually a rule that the word after the ":" must be capitalized. I always have to go back through my English writing and un-capitalize those words because I just can't get used to not doing it.
Oh, interesting. A couple hundred years again, it used to be the done thing in written English to capitalise every noun in a sentence, German-style. The Yanks have "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility", for example. We've mostly stopped doing that now. There were a lot of German immigrants to the early US; whether they've taken your influence on colons, or whether it's just pre-standardisation English and it needed to be one way or another...
We'd consider excessive capitalisation, or worse, running all-caps, to be the sign of a diseased mind, now. Not naming any names.