[fuzzer371]

No one uses em dashes

[dragonwriter]

If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.

[crimony]

Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.

[BLKNSLVR]

That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.

[schrodinger]

I do—all the time. Why not?

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9

[dboreham]

I didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.

[rmunn]

Except for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted.

Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...

  Because I could not stop for Death –
  He kindly stopped for me –
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove – He knew no haste
  And I had put away
  My labor and my leisure too,
  For His Civility –

Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).

[Finnucane]

Here is an image of the original manuscript page:

https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893

Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.

[0xis]

When I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.

[awakeasleep]

Except for highly literate people, and people who care about typography.

Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.

[amrocha]

My impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.

[DocTomoe]

Tell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.

[account42]

Approximately no one writes internet comments or even articles in LaTeX.