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Incorrect use of em dashes - replace with en dashes #418

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SophieAmnesty opened this issue Oct 8, 2024 · 4 comments
Open

Incorrect use of em dashes - replace with en dashes #418

SophieAmnesty opened this issue Oct 8, 2024 · 4 comments
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chore Neither a feature nor a bug fix

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@SophieAmnesty
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Describe the bug
Users have been using em dashes in their content incorrectly. They should be using en dashes instead. Hopefully there is a global fix we can do to fix this across the whole website.

Em dashes are sometimes incorrectly used as punctuation. Amnesty House Style states:

Use dashes (–), with a space on either side, NOT hyphens, as a form of punctuation, such as to indicate a
break in the natural syntax of a sentence in speech. Use an en-dash (–), not the longer em-dash (—).

Examples:
image
https://www.amnesty.org/en/careers/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/tech/surveillance-giants/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/unite-for-afghanistan/

If we simply replaced all em dashes on the website with en dashes, this should work as a fix.

However, em dashes are also sometimes used with no spaces on either side. In this case we would want to replace the em dash with an en dash but also add a space on either side.

I'm trying to collect some more examples of this.

We may want to check whether a similar issue is happening with French/Spanish/Arabic text.

@SophieAmnesty SophieAmnesty added the chore Neither a feature nor a bug fix label Oct 8, 2024
@SophieAmnesty
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SPANISH:

The rule does not apply to Spanish, so please skip the Spanish site when you launch the find-and-replace operation.
In fact, in Spanish the correct dash is the longer one (—).

@SophieAmnesty
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ARABIC

It is a non-issue in Arabic. No need to address it. Thanks!

@SophieAmnesty
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FRENCH:

In French, the rule is (or was) to use the em-dash, but it's almost never followed, and today both the en-dash and em-dash can be considered as correct when used to introduce a parenthetical element, so no need to fix anything in French! 🙂

@SophieAmnesty
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It would be good if we could also somehow make it so that em dashes are blocked from future use on the English site too.

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