I use em-dashes a lot and I don’t want to stop using it.

I saw a post shared on my feed a few weeks ago about how there was a law document¹ that had em-dashes used in them, therefore this was using AI, even if the disclosure information clause specifically stated otherwise.

Source: [View on Facebook]

Today as well, I saw this post from Jeffrey Zeldman also talking about the em-dash and commenting about the sentiment on whether to abandon usage of it altogether in human writing.

Zeldman’s thoughts on the matter resonate with me. This kind of discussion point kinda trended already beforehand when the first wave of initial AI LLMs hit the market and were now being used en-masse by loads of people. Suddenly people were asking ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, or whichever flavor LLM you wanted to use—Meta AI maybe?²—to help them with their (formal) writing, and thus came out the slew of em-dashes that got people talking: hey, why is there suddenly a surge of the usage of em-dashes in a lot of social media or online content? Oh no, it’s AI!!!

I for one will continue to use em-dashes—maybe even wrongly, or maybe this is actually correct, I don’t know, also don’t really care much—simply because I know how to type it out on both the PC or on mobile, and I like how it looks. It’s like it’s connecting two pieces of the original sentence together while I spliced in another thought or statement in the middle. Bagay sa mga taong tulad ko na bigla na lang liliko minsan sa ibang topic while talking about something else.

And with that, I will just share here how one can type an em-dash in whichever (major) platform or device.

How to type an em-dash

On Windows

Back when I was still primarily using Windows on my PC, I would press Windows+. on my keyboard. That’s mostly used for typing in emojis, but if you press Tab throughout the various tabs for the popover that shows up, you can go to the special characters section and then from there, I just navigate to the em-dash—or en-dash, too, if I so desire—and then press Enter. Violà!

Source: Windows keyboard tips and tricks

Maybe you’re wondering, why not use the Numpad and do that combo thing instead?

Well, for the most part, the keyboards I’ve gone and used over the past several years don’t have a numpad, or the numpad is hidden in another keyboard layer—like for split keyboards—so I had to find another way to type it easily. And since the Windows or Super key plus the period were always readily available, I just made use of that more.

On Mac

I type a lot on all the work Macbooks I’ve owned throughout the years and have learned this a long time ago: you just press Shift+Option+-. Mac also has a lot of other ways to type special characters, too—you could try holding the the Option key and press other various keys on your keyboard to see what other symbols you can type.

For an en-dash—the one in the middle of a - dash and the actual — em-dash—you just need to press Option+-.

The way I remember it is:

• the dash (-) is short
• then follows the en-dash (–)
• then the longest is the em-dash (—)

Source: Business Insider

On a mobile device (Android or iOS)

Mobile keyboards have the special characters or symbols keyboard layer accessible with a toggle button on the left hand side, usually. Once you’re on the symbols layer of your keyboard, you just have to look for the hyphen (-) key and long press it until the extra symbols show up, then you can select either an en-dash or an em-dash from there with a swipe.

I am on iOS, so that’s the example I have currently. I know Android is more or less the same.

On Linux

dun dun dun here we are, in present day!³

For Linux, there was a bit of setup involved before it became super easy for me to type the em-dash.

The default keyboard layout that comes with CachyOS—which is what I’m using until now, so far so good—is just the normal US Keyboard. Eventually I got fed up not being able to access my beloved em-dash with just a quick keyboard macro and had to look for a way to make it easier for me to do it.

I saw this post on AskUbuntu and this post on the SuperUser StackExchange forums and saw the same thing mentioned: the AltGr key.

I was not familiar with this key on the keyboard at all. Eventually I learned that the US-International keyboard layout was different from the US-International keyboard layout with AltGr keys too. That was an interesting read on Wikipedia…

Quick commercial before I continue on!

I originally started writing this post in March 24, but when I got to this part I kinda got stuck between wanting to trace back how I initially installed the way I got my AltGr Intl keyboard installed on my Linux and leaving that a mystery.

Then life got in the way—essentially I just got too busy to get back to this until now—and I’ve made the resolution to just write this and things moving forward to the best of my ability at the time I put them together. And stuff with Linux isn’t always straightforward too. Maybe in the future I’ll just link back to this when I finally have the time to trace back my steps from before.

Now, back to what I was saying 😆

I don’t really remember at the moment of writing how exactly I installed it, but after trying a bunch of things, I eventually ended up being able to type Unicode characters and even my surname properly without having to resort to searching online, “how to type enye”⁴ or “how to type em-dash/en-dash”.

So, for the purposes of this section, the way I got to type an em-dash now is to first press Ctrl+Shift+U which shows a U+ automatically where your text cursor is while typing. That means you can type the number code for the Unicode character you want to type—in my case, that’s 2014 for em-dash—and then press Enter. The U+2014 gets replaced with an em-dash (—)!

For an en-dash, it’s just -1 from 2014. So, U+2013 is an en-dash: –. This is supposedly the correct way to add a dash between dates, or so I remember (but forget the actual source).

Wrapping up

Like I said earlier in this post, I still plan to use em-dashes a lot when I type since it’s so fun to type! I feel like I’m typing a special code just to type stuff hehe (technically, it is one…)

Part of me sometimes wonders or worries that other people might think I’m using AI for writing just because I have em-dashes in the things I write. But sometimes I do use it wrongly—or too much even—and that may be more of a dead giveaway of someone who just likes using / typing em-dashes a lot rather than the text being something generated from a prompt.

The generator is me! The prompt lives in my brain! And I used my appendages to press the correct keys in order so I get—here it comes—an em-dash to type my sentences 😁

Footnotes

1. I’m not really sure what this is at this point, as it’s also just a passing post on my social media feed. ↩

2. lol nah but go off if you ever use it I guess ↩

3. I ordered the sections based on the first type of device I’ve used to the latest one 😁 ↩

4. btw for this one, it’s a slightly different approach on my Linux keyboard layout: I press AltGr+Ctrl+Shift+~ then press n when I see the ~ with an underline appear. The n—or whichever valid letter you type—gets a neat tilde added on top afterwards. It’s a similar manner to how one types it on Mac and Windows, too, but with a slight difference, as the AltGr key isn’t as emphasized for the latter OSes than doing it for Linux. ↩