dedash

• SKILL.mdcore · 3,797 bytes

Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from the scope the user names, one occurrence at a time, while leaving hyphens, ranges, and deliberate marks alone.

## Goal

Replace each em-dash that should not remain with the mark or wording its clause actually needs. Target any dash doing an em-dash's job, whatever its exact character: U+2014 and its longer or repurposed look-alikes all read the same on the page. The user owns the scope: a passage, field, file, selection, or tree. Do not widen it without asking.

## Workflow

1. **FIND**: Take the exact scope from the user and locate every dash doing an em-dash's job in it, judged by the role it plays in the sentence, not its codepoint: any mark that sets off an aside, an appositive, an abrupt turn, or a missing conjunction. The em-dash (U+2014) is the common one; the horizontal bar (U+2015) and the two- and three-em dashes (U+2E3A, U+2E3B) read the same and count. The en-dash (U+2013) is the boundary case: it counts when it joins clauses where an em-dash would fit, but stays when it spans a range's endpoints, numeric or not (`1990–2020`, the `London–Paris` route). A dash doing a non-em job (a hyphen, a minus, a range) stays. Surface anything genuinely ambiguous as a judgment call rather than changing it blindly.
2. **REPLACE per role**: Choose per occurrence by grammatical role:
   - *Parenthetical aside*: commas or parentheses when the dashed material can be lifted out of the sentence.
   - *Appositive*: a colon or comma when the dashed material renames, defines, or expands the noun before it.
   - *Abrupt turn*: a full stop, semicolon, or comma when the dash marks a pivot, interruption, or restart.
   - *False-conjunction break*: rewrite the sentence when the dash stands in for a missing "and", "but", "because", "so", or another real connective.