If you type two hyphens with no space between them, that's an em dash--Word automatically turns them into one long dash. They're a great writing device, like a visual aside or a semicolon.

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An em dash is--well, like a comma, but sort of indicates a different sort of pause. I often use em-dashes for asides--like this one!--or to indicate a pause that's a bit longer than a comma but still relevant. -- is turned by word into —, which is the emdash.

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(as opposed to the rarer, thinner, en-dash: '–', most commonly used to separate numbers in date ranges or sports scores. Commonly mistaken for the even thinner hyphen: '-')

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This: — …It’s called that because it’s the width of a small m.

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Lots of us use it to indicate a brief pause in a sentence—like that. LLMs use it a lot because they were trained on the material of real writers (like me), and some confused people think it’s a sign that something was written by AI. (Which is ridiculous.)

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