A native English-speaking friend taught me how to use em dashes a couple of months ago, after I complained that I had no idea how to cram a bunch of thoughts into one sentence without using a trillion commas. Now that I’ve learned this little cheat code, I’m worried people will assume I’m using AI to write—since apparently, that’s one of the so-called tells. I never thought proper punctuation and grammar would be controversial, but here we are.
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As a very, very heavy former Em-dash user, I have now gutted them from writing outright to avoid accusations of AI. I use a lot of flourishing detail and sometimes my trademark is dry wrought humor, which can be indicative of AI so I have done everything I can to alter parts of my writing style and grammar to avoid even a notion of the headache being accused causes.
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So, after the P.R.O.T.O.C.O.L. implementation yesterday, I did not get enough sleep last night as I began work on heavy coding and variable structure to implement traits and key components for P.R.O.T.O.C.O.L. stats.
What I would love is a bit of poll feedback on if you think I took the right direction for traits. While this list does not include Wacky traits (as honestly those will take quite a bit of time in the roadmap to implement), I have created a list of 14 neutral, 8 positive, and 8 negative traits within The Frontier.
With negative traits in particular, I know some players love a challenge. But I also decided given some of those can be a bit harsh that picking a negative trait adds a Trait Point specifically for picking a neutral trait, allowing a fun trade-off if you stack on the challenge.
Positive traits are there for players who want easier gameplay, overall. Then again, players only get two Trait Points if they don’t take a negative trait.
Anyways, from my table I’ve built in Obsidian, had to take it in images!
For the poll. How do you feel about the traits presented?
- I love them!
- I like them.
- They’re alright.
- Not a great set of Traits, frankly.
0
voters
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I for one will not give up my em dashes.
I’m also having an urge to name something “Parasol Corps”, but that’s unrelated.
Every time I see an effect that increases XP, my first thought is “what’s the level cap and how likely am I going to hit it?”
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Definitely being figured out. Likely to be 100 and run a natural curve. I think due to the sheer amount of content expected to be implemented over the game’s development lifetime, hitting it is more than likely. Either that, or NG+ will do the same thing.
A key component is balancing, and so truthfully I have to work the curve once I see how gameplay is impacted. Right now, I can do my best to take a ‘birds-eye’ view of the game and all stats at a distance, implement barriers, and reasonably implement numbers based on my gaming and development knowledge, but it’s impossible to say any single + or - amount will remain the same 6 months from now without seeing that in gameplay of sorts, haha.
That said, I hope at the least minus the XP parts, that it seems like a solidly presented list.
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Em dashes are fine, use them however much you want!
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I have never used em dashes that much because I think they’re awkward. Like, why can’t they be separated by a space to make it more clear? Oftentimes I first combine the first two words around the dash before realizing the whole subsequent rest of the sentence is attached, not just that first word.
I wish that that em dashes -were used like this- instead of-like this-but those are the rules
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A lot of native English speakers don’t use proper grammar. Personally, I was never taught how to use dashes in a proper way. So there may be things that are correct but uncommon. A semicolon (
for example. I have never used one in my entire life
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I thought that was stylistic preference?
Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
I always use spaces around em dashes, although I’d been intentionally misusing en dashes as em dashes for years because I thought em dashes looked weirdly long. Finally started using em dashes just in time for them to be deemed a surefire sign of AI.
I think it’s ridiculous people claim it must be AI because “no one knows how to type them”. Firstly, many word processing programs and places that accept markdown (including this very forum) render -- as an en dash and --- as an em dash. On iOS you can long press on the hyphen key to bring up a menu that will let you insert an en or em dash, and on Mac OS the keyboard commands are Shift + - and Shift + Option + - respectively; it’s not rocket science.
On Windows, it’s apparently Alt + 0150 and Alt + 0151, which, really? but I imagine tons of Windows users use en and dashes thanks to the ubiquitous aforementioned replacements.
Having now done two minutes of research, it looks like I’ve been unintentionally misusing dashes in other ways:
Em dashes are used in place of commas or parentheses to emphasize or draw attention to parenthetical or amplifying material. In this particular task, em dashes occupy a kind of middle ground among the three: when commas do the job, the material is most closely related to what’s around it, and when parentheses do the job, the material is most distantly related to what’s around it; when dashes do the job the material is somewhere in the middle.
Definitely haven’t been doing that.
use the en dash to replace a hyphen in compound adjectives when at least one of the elements is a two-word compound.
the pre–Websterburg Bakery era
The thinking is that using a hyphen here, as in “the pre-Websterburg Bakery era,” risks the suggestion that pre attaches only to Websterburg.
Or that.
The en dash replaces the word to between capitalized names, and is used to indicate linkages such as boundaries, treaties, and oppositions.
a Springfield–Websterburg train
the pie–cake divide
A two-em dash, ——, is used to indicate missing letters in a word and, less frequently, to indicate a missing word.
The butter-stained and crumb-embedded note was attributed to a Ms. M—— of Websterburg.
A three-em dash, ———, indicates that a word has been left out or that an unknown word or figure is to be supplied.
Years later it was revealed that the Websterburg bakers had once had a bakery in ———, a city to the south. But the water quality there was prohibitive to the creating of decent bagels.
If I can plead leniency, I’m pretty sure I didn’t learn any of this in school.
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Semicolons aren’t uncommon …
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I think around 2012-2014, I used as many semicolons as humanly possible…
Now I just like them and use them appropriately
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My high school English classes had this monumentally annoying syllabus that required one semicolon per page. This annoyed the heck out of me because I already used semicolons very naturally, and the idea of using a semicolon when it wasn’t conducive to the best way of saying what I was trying to say offended me to the depths of my soul. Fortunately, since I use semicolons rather frequently and the “per page” requirement was satisfied with an average of one per page rather than requiring one literally on every page, I rarely had to sacrifice the quality of my work to fit the rubric, at least in that regard.
But don’t get me started on how schools teach adequate writing at the expense of good writing, or you’ll never get me to shut up.
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My approach to stylistic rules of writing and the kind of prose they teach you in school is that you should learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
It’s like the difference between shoplifting a loaf of bread and defrauding a payday loans company.
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In my Junior year, we mostly learned a bunch of fancy rhetoric and diction, but not how to properly use them. You can imagine how badly that might have turned out in the hands of a 17 year old writing his first novel 
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Of course.
The trouble is when you already know what they’re trying to teach you. They don’t ask whether you used only one semicolon in this three-page paper because you barely know what a semicolon is or because you thought the rest of the paper flowed better as separate sentences. They don’t ask whether you used this overdone cliché phrase because you don’t know any other ways to say the same thing or because you considered several alternatives and this was the one that best expressed your meaning. They don’t care if that personal anecdote genuinely supports your reading of the text (and you’ve read actual academic writing and you know a lot of scholars don’t hesitate to write in first person). You’re fourteen, so clearly you don’t know shit, and you’re forcing yourself to turn in work that you know isn’t your best because you had to alter it so Mr. Procrustes wouldn’t drop you half a letter grade for every semicolon you didn’t use.
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Very common reaction. I defy the consensus on this though. If people are using frequency of em-dashes to say something is AI, I don’t want them as my readers anyway.
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Unfortunately, AI writing accusations are heating up as a way to take down competition, which I deeply detest.
Add to the fact that there are still people who believe AI writing detection software works. You can put in novels from 100 years ago and it’ll say they’re 98% AI.
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Yeah, em dashes are so elegant and aesthetically pleasing. I’m reluctant to give them up in favor of plain commas.
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Totally agree. I feel much more comfortable with UK style em-dashes — separated by a space on each side — than the US squished-up punctuation sokoban
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So true!!
Wait a minute…
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