If you have no idea what in the world you could possibly need them for, why would you? They seem to be dying out as a thing, and I cant say I percieve a real lack.
dash use varies by publication. yes I'm sure theres a "correct" version in some book somewhere, or some jackass with a blog who decided they own grammar now, and then theres another one over there that uses different rules. i dont bother to keep my dash use straight or "correct" according to Google rando of the day because the main publication I write for has very unique (probably "incorrect," but they also have enough readers that i cant imagine they care) dash rules optimized for seo, while another one has different rules, and im not being paid to keep my dash rules straight in fanfic
I fucking love em-dashes and will use them all. Same with semi-colons. Give me all the unloved punctuation, i will cherish them with my little black sub-editor heart for the rest of my unnatural life.
I'll admit, half the time my pre-posting editing run through is just pruning dashes most of the time. Because fuck me, I love em-dashes too much, and it does genuinely fuck with the flow of the writing sometimes.
By all means! I just got grumpy over the judgement. The only thing i was taught either hyphens or dashes for (Look they´re the same damn symbol) is splitting words at the end of a line, and in this age of electronics that´s only really useful in poetry. A lot of my grumpyness is that i keep my writings as simple as i can bc undiagnosed maybe dyslexia is no fun, and adding More symbols i will inevitable forget how to use maketh me grumpy. (WTF do semi colons do? We just don´t know and it´s never come up enough to matter, a comma or a : does the job just fine) Adding to my own gripe about language, I wish people would agree on where commas are supposed to go. Just Pick One. (Or shut up if I forget one of the contradicting rules about them)
BLASPHEMY I feel a great disturbance in the Grammar, as if thousands of typesetters suddenly cried out in terror and were silenced... (I joke, it's cool. Language is ever-evolving and resilient, it can cope. My snarky sub-ed days are behind me.)
I use semicolons occasionally. Besides certain lists, I use them when I have two related statements that are complete on their own but feel a little disjointed without an indication that they’re supposed to be understood in context of each other. I just wrote something like, “I have found that people rarely do things exactly the way I most want. And that’s okay; if that were really my priority, I could do this other activity instead.” I thought a comma made it read weirdly, like I didn’t really think it was okay but was trying to minimize my feelings for some reason. I could have used a period but I didn’t like it because those statements are two parts of one thought. I don’t want them to read like they’re meant to stand alone. I almost never use dashes for anything besides connecting words into a single term. They just don’t often uniquely fill a need I have in my own writing. I’m perfectly happy with other people using them though. (I am actually distressed about google docs not making em dashes while I type, to my surprise. I’ve been transcribing comics that have lots of them. I’m making do with the regular dash but I don’t like it.)
The lack of gdocs auto-formatting em-dashes is the bane of my goddamn existence--actually, the original reason I started exporting to Word before posting was just to correct that. It's a good habit now, because it means I have a hard copy as well as a cloud copy, but oof I am really, really annoyed that I have to do it in the first place.
That's really good info. Would it also help with the fucky spacing that Google Docs does when you copy things directly from there to AO3?
I remember seeing a post for how to fix that but fuck if I know what I did with it. Curse past me for their lackluster tagging consistency!
It should! I've never had an issue with fucked up spacing bouncing from Word to AO3, though I do still need to go through and delete extra line breaks between paragraphs. In practice, it means I do two editing passes: the first one in Word, the second in the AO3 interface. (Though, you know, shit still slips between the cracks, especially if I'm posting at 11pm or something when my brain is not primed to actually catch errors.)
If you happen to find it I'd love a link! It's okay if not, but yeah, if you do end up stumbling upon it at some point let me know! <3
Also, on the subject of dashes and semicolons: I use both a lot, but I use them correctly. I can actually understand why a lot of writers fuck it up, though--the state of grammar education in the US, at least in my experience, is abysmal. It's barely taught at all, I feel like. I'm only good at it because I'm hyperlexic (so I did a ton of reading as a kid and picked things up) and my mom is an English major/professional copy editor who would always help with things like that in my writing, honestly. (It still bugs the shit out of me when people make grammatical fuckups that seem super obvious to me, though. >:/)
