r/WritingPrompts • u/katpoker666 Moderator • 3d ago
Off Topic [OT] SatChat: How do you feel about commas and emdashes? (New here? Introduce yourself!)
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Suggested Topic
How do you feel about commas and emdashes?
Do you like a lot of commas or do you err on the side of sparsity? Why?
Do you use hyphens or emdashes in your work? Why or why not? If so, how?
What about semicolons and colons? Old-fashioned or useful?
Where do you land on the punctuation making your writing look like AI? Is that a worry?
How did you learn about using punctuation?
Or maybe you don’t really think much about punctuation. Tell us what that’s like and why. We'd love to hear!
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u/deannatoi 3d ago
I'm very pro punctuation, especially in writing fiction or really anything that isn't just a text or a casual comment online. The whole purpose of punctuation is to make your writing more readable. Commas, hyphens, em-dashes and semicolons, when used correctly, all help to organize a text and make it more clearly understood. To forego using punctuation--or to limit its usage out of fear or insecurity--will only make your writing less comprehensible to your readers.
For the record I do not use AI in any form in my writing--or in any other aspect of my life, for that matter. I loathe generative AI with the passion of a thousand suns; especially in the way that it infiltrates and ruins online art spaces. The fact that we've gotten to a place where we have to worry about our creative labors being suspected or assumed to be AI, is incredibly depressing to me.
A book that was really helpful to me, as well as just being a highly enjoyable read (especially for a book on punctuation), is The Well Tempered Sentence by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. You can read it for free on the Internet Archive (as I did).
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u/katpoker666 Moderator 3d ago
Thanks for replying, deannatoi! 100% agree with you regarding punctuation’s clarity value. Your book recommendation looks really useful—appreciate you including it
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u/psilocybediatribe 3d ago
I think you're spot on when it comes to punctuation. It 100% makes your writing more readable. Reading writing without punctuation is so confusing. Though I do like the manipulation or limited use of punctuation in certain cases, stream of consciousness or to subvert the writing in some way come to mind.
"To forego using punctuation--or to limit its usage out of fear or insecurity--will only make your writing less comprehensible to your readers." That's a quote right there.
I actually like AI for certain use cases. Like research but I stick to things like Claude projects ad NotebookLM where I can upload my own sources and then have a conversation to dive deeper into certain aspects or ask questions about areas I'm unfamiliar with. But I work in quantitative biology so I use things like generative protein models to craft novel sequences. I agree with you on generative AI art though and how depressing it is that being a good technical writer can raise suspicion of AI use.
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u/Jazehiah 3d ago
Punctuation is good, but it's hard to know when I'm using it correctly. I feel like I should buy a copy of a style guide published before LLMs became a thing.
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u/katpoker666 Moderator 3d ago
Thanks for replying, Jazehiah! And yeah, style guides can be a great resource
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u/psilocybediatribe 3d ago
Big fan of the hyphen, love it for dialogue. I wasn’t familiar with the emdash until chatgpt came around. Then I realized I was using hyphens as emdashes, for both a stammering effect “P-p-please” and to cut off speech “Officer, I can explain-“ always wondering why my quotation mark was wonky. “Officer, I can explain—” I’m actually pissed that was so easy. And I’ve been writing for years. I usually write the text “Officer, I can explain” then move back and slip the hyphen in. Like a moron. But now with the rise of llm’s I worry about using them and having people think it’s AI. They’re superior to hyphens for their use and look much better but that AI stigma surrounds them.
Couldn’t tell you when to use a semicolon if my life depended on it. I use them at Word’s discretion sometimes but mostly ignore them. They just look like a little winky face in the middle of my text. Colons I’m down with. Colons I get.
I think I have to read the book deannatoi recommended because after writing this I have some things to sort out. Thanks for the rec btw.
My favorite though is the ellipsis… I love the pause, the hesitation, the tension, the thought left unfinished. They’re so… ominous. Fantastic in dialogue. Like if I get a text “We need to talk.” I’m thinking ok, I’m in trouble. But if you hit me with the “We need to talk…” I’m instantly imagining a hundred different scenarios and know I’m well and truly…
Cool topic. Curious to hear what other’s think.
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u/QTFroame 2d ago
Yea I love using ellipses. It can be so poignant. I try not to overdo it nowadays, as I used to use it pretty often imo. Sorta surprised you weren't familiar with em dashes until chatgpt came along.
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u/Tomorrow_Is_Today1 /r/TomorrowIsTodayWrites 3d ago
Love em-dashes. Love semicolons and colons, though we tend to be hesitant to use them in fiction lest we be hit with anti-intellectualism or lest it not quite match the writing style or our POV characters. People who would accuse us of using AI just for using punctuation are people just looking for someone to be angry at and I'm not going to change myself for the sake of them, because the attempts to meet their approval would be endless and fruitless.
Commas are the most confusing punctuation mark imo. Semicolons have rules! I know what specific case to use them in! Commas have like a million uses and it's hard to know when a comma is necessary or when a sentence has too many commas. At this point it's intuitive.
We learned punctuation and grammar rules in school, with the basics fairly early on and then stuff like semicolons and colons later on when we were like 15.
Punctuation and grammar interact with style in weird ways. Because the rules we learn are mainly for formal English, the type used in academic essays, but the way we talk follows different rules, and fiction prose tends to exist somewhere in the middle or on the outside. We're considering the rhythm and flow of the sentences, the emotional impact of a sudden sentence fragment on a new line, how to keep a reader engaged through a paragraph of longer sentences and what information is relevant to convey.
Not to mention we write a lot of poetry, which is even further out from prose, and the most important piece of punctuation in poetry is the line break. You can write a poem with no other punctuation at all except line breaks. Or you can write what are essentially prose sentences but formatted as a poem (though often you'll have sentences written for a poem that are grammatically correct but, if read as prose without the line breaks, would be kinda weird).
We kinda rambled a lot. Uhhhh TL;DR know the rules so you can break them? but there's different rules for formal English, fiction prose writing, and poetry. like how a sudden fragment creates emphasis in fiction prose but wouldn't be acceptable in an essay.
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u/katpoker666 Moderator 3d ago
Thanks for replying, Toms! Some great points about punctuation in different styles of writing. I also loved your comment about AI
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u/mysteryrouge 2d ago
Commas. Commas? Serial comma abuser Though I am learning to master the em dash and the parenthetical. I always feel like I'm using them wrong, especially with dialogue tags.
I forget semicolons and colons exist. The eldritch UN stole them
On the ai front, I think it's less my punctuation that would get me accused of ai and more of the prose structure things I'll do such as rule of three.
Anyways, here's the recent story of the day
And check out my spreadsheet for more of my writing.
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u/katpoker666 Moderator 2d ago
Thanks for replying, Scythe! I’m a (mostly) reformed comma abuser. It’s really worth watching some of the FTF and Sersun folks for how they use them as well as asking for grammatical feedback
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u/QTFroame 2d ago
I would say it's hard to tell, but I feel like I tend to use commas more than usual. I try not to let it happen too much. Diversity in sentence structure is important and can impact how your audience reads your story. I actually think hyphens and em dashes are useful. I love using them whenever I see an appropriate time for them. I do not have any love for semicolons. The same can't be said for colons, though, as I like them. Do I use them? Almost never, but they're good.
AI writing is more than just grammar. But I don't think I do any of the telltale AI stuff. I will never worry about it, and honestly, I kinda think there are easier tells than punctuation. All my learning about punctuation outside of old English classes is self-taught. There are definitely ways I can shape up my fundamental knowledge! Though there's always so much to do.
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u/katpoker666 Moderator 2d ago
Thanks for replying, QT! Absolutely agree that diverse sentence structures can make a piece so much better. I can also relate to learning a ton outside of school and needing to do so really
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u/QTFroame 2d ago
Life is a beautiful journey of learning, so it's always nice when you can correctly identify your blind spots. We'll get there, probably.
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u/WernerderChamp 2d ago
I always run my writings through Grammarly, and there are always a dozen misspellings and bad punctuation. I have gotten better at spelling, but my commas errors are rather consistent.
Being German, my english tends to have longer sentences, so semicolons and dashes are commonly used.
Grammarly might be some sort of AI (althrough it predates the GPT hype so if it is, it is probably a dedicated, self trained model). I do NOT use the AI text generation functionality through, all the wording is my very own.
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u/Jay_Pederson r/JayPederson 2d ago
Do you like a lot of commas or do you err on the side of sparsity? Why?
I think the Oxford comma is overrated. I personally (and when I test it myself) feel people do not pause at the end of a list of three items for example. Whether it be short, long or etc in fact doing that saying aloud, I basically said "Longor". Commas I just go with if I feel a pause is there, or if a sentence is longer than it should.
Do you use hyphens or emdashes in your work? Why or why not? If so, how?
Yes, I love having dialogue be cluttery and interrupted, or just interruptions of thoughts. Useful prose.
What about semicolons and colons? Old-fashioned or useful?
I started adding them after a friend of mine who hates Twilight (apparently to prove a woman Twilight was bad, he bought, read, and then found her again and said 'it was bad this time I read it) and mentioned Stephanie Meyer's writing style was an overuse of semi-colons. Anyways I started using them because of that.
Colons I very very occasionally use though that has more to do with the fact I just...don't enter a lot of situations where I can use them.
Semi-colons are incredibly useful too; they can replace three different functions, but or more often replaced by those functions.
Where do you land on the punctuation making your writing look like AI? Is that a worry?
Screams internally (this will be a part two)
How did you learn about using punctuation?
Google.
Where do you land on the punctuation making your writing look like AI? Is that a worry?
I think most people who say this just assume bad writing that looks not terrible = AI.
Apparently a big problem with is many neurodivergent people's writing is that it kinda looks like AI. Either way, I find it more believable most of the people near-religiously witch hunting AI just assume bad writing = AI, because when people then say you can't always tell and bring up some signs (it's not about x it's about y, which is normally incorrectly used by AI, AI generates single line paragraphs etc.) and then just 'naw it's always obvious bro'. As well as when AI actually spits out a good story, then people will be distraught and find it almost unbelievable AI could actually make something passable.
Really, the best way to not be accused of AI is be a good writer. The people actually using sign checks will notice it doesn't pass (I once imitated ChatGPT writing since the character was a chatbot, and I got I think 1% chance of being AI writing?) and most people...won't care if it's good and assume it's not fake, essentially.
Which fucking sucks for new writers. Being accused of AI when you're not is a genuinely awful thing. That and people who do actually use AI are normally business people with 'own the creatives' energy (common on r/newauthor; 'people are accusing me of ai''hey I took a look at your story and it looks like you are using ai''what's wrong with ai' weird shit like that--never went there reddit just recommended it and for some reason all the posts were people sad of being accused by ai...then people look and realize their writing is one line 'paragraphs' and other ai tells), or people who like...generate Star Wars Shitposts like Dooku fight but Anakin complains about sand even after his hand gets cut off. Former is dumb, bad, and annoying because it's just the business people who fire their entire staff the second they find out AI can do things. The latter is fine. Using ChatGPT to generate stupid shit for yourself no one (or just your friends) will read for no monetary gain is fine.
The Dooku thing is not a random example; someone mentioned they were a writer and used GPT to just generate shitposts they wanted to read but not write, but would write their own original work if that makes sense.
There is always a somewhat looming worry but I now have a large backlog of non-AI stuff so should be fine. My main AI worry is more if the market gets too saturated, but if the book gets a strong start then it...should be fine i think.
Also ellipses is the best punctuation that isn't the period, comma, exclamation or question mark (sidenote: this sentence is why you're supposed to use an Oxford comma. So when a sentence lacks it, it reads ''exclamation or question' mark' so it's one item with two possible options. That being said I don't use it in dialogue since I don't pause where the oxford comma is).
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u/john-wooding 2d ago
I have a definite weakness for complex punctuation and overly-long sentences; the idea of bonus content speaks to me. That means I overuse semicolons and em-dashes, but I still think they're important. I should reduce my usage but not remove them entirely.
Where do you land on the punctuation making your writing look like AI? Is that a worry?
Not at all. A while back, ludicrous over-use (not use, and not over-use, but usage that humans would never do) was a tell for AI. That hasn't been true for ages, and it was never the most identifiable feature.
Frankly, every time I see someone now hand-wringing over how their punctuation use will make them seem like AI, they turn out to either be
- Someone deliberately muddying the waters (so they can continue flooding online spaces with AI)
- Someone trusting who has listened to the first sort of person without reflecting on it
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u/katpoker666 Moderator 2d ago
Thanks for replying, John! I think that’s a great point regarding reducing usage of some punctuation vs removing them entirely. It’s definitely down to personal preference and it’s not binary
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