[shippage]

I'm also on the spectrum and like using various kinds of parallel construction, including antithesis.

I also tend to use a lot of em dashes. If I posted something I wrote in, say, 2010, I'd likely get a lot of comments about my writing absolutely, 100% being AI-written. I have posted old writing snippets in the past year and gotten this exact reaction.

I originally (two decades ago) started using em dashes, I think, because I also tend to go off on frequent tangents or want to add additional context, and at the beginning of the tangent, I'm not entirely sure how I'll phrase it. So, instead of figuring out the best punctuation at that moment (be that a parenthesis, a comma, or a semicolon for a list), I'll just type an em dash (easy on a Mac).

Then I don't go back and fix it afterward because I have too many thoughts and not enough time to express them. There are popular quotes about exactly this issue.

It's a kind of laziness in the form of my expression to give me more mental capacity to focus on the content. Alt 0151 and Alt 0150 are still burned into my memory from typing em dashes and en dashes so often on Windows.

I suppose I'll have to consider this my own punctuation mode collapse that RLHF is now forcing me to correct.

[yellowapple]

I've started deliberately using em-dashes and “smart” quotes (made easy by configuring a compose key) — mostly because they look nice, but also out of spite for any software that's somehow not properly Unicode-aware in 20-fucking-25.