Meghan Duffy tweeted a CHE article by Anne Curzan about using (or overusing) em dashes, which led a few folks on Twitter to point out ways to type a true em dash (— instead of --, for example). On an iOS device, you can simply press and hold the hyphen to get a pop-up list of other dashes. On a Mac, you can hold the shift and option keys (some know option as the alt key) while typing a hyphen. But you have to remember which key combo to press, and if your habit is to type --, it can take a long time to get used to Shift+Option+-.

Making your own shortcuts

If you don’t want to relearn the keys you’re pressing, you don’t have to. You can make your own shortcut so that when you type -- it becomes —. The best part of this trick is that it applies well beyond em dashes. You can use text shortcuts like this one to save yourself time in all kinds of ways.