Dashes are dashing—use them more!
Don’t listen to people who say that em dashes make you sound like ChatGPT.
There are lots of features of our devices that I—and so I’m guessing you—did not know about. For instance, it’s always puzzled me that iPhones only have portrait orientation lock (or at any rate, locking your phone to landscape is much harder). But actually, this isn’t too limiting—if you hold your phone with the top facing down, it’ll stay in landscape mode rather than going into upside-down portrait mode.
Similarly, it always seemed a bit annoying that they had no button for an en dash (–) or an em dash (—). En dashes are good for abbreviating “to” (“March 12–April 1”, “Oxford–Cambridge”, “1–10”), for hyphenating with compound words (“New York–hating Philadelphian”), and – with spaces around them – in place of em dashes (like that). Em dashes are good for asides, as an alternative to commas or parentheses.
In some apps—like Substack—a double-hyphen will turn into an em dash. But if you hold down the hyphen button, then options for the en and em dashes—as well as the times symbol (•)—pop up!
On Mac, pressing Option+Hyphen yields an en dash, and Shift+Option+Hyphen yields an em dash. But, by default, dashes are much harder to type on Windows.
At the same time, CapsLock occupies a really nice location on the keyboard—but it’s not really necessary (you can just hold down Shift if you want all caps). Solution: re-map CapsLock to an en dash, and Shift+CapsLock to an em dash, using this nice tool called “AutoHotKey” (if you can’t find it by Googling, you probably should not try modifying your keyboard).
Here’s the code snippet I use; make sure to run it on start-up (otherwise, it might reset whenever your computer restarts).
#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
SetCapsLockState "AlwaysOff"
CapsLock:: {
SendText("–")
}
+CapsLock:: {
SendText("—")
}