Leaving out apostrophes isn't the same though, is it? If you leave out apostrophes you have syntactic effects while a (sortof)dash is still sort of a dash?
Its not exactly the same, of course, but its pretty analogous. It’s a minor, technically incorrect change that doesnt change meaning or understandability most of the time. Ive left out a bunch of apostrophes in this paragraph and Im pretty sure nobody will have a hard time understanding any of it. Yet it would bug me to actually write like this.
I don't know how this works nowadays but when I got taught to write (the pencil and paper kind) and specifically when I got taught syntax, it was "if you want to introduce a clause that explains or expands upon something that precedes it, you draw a small horizontal line" no mention of special chars, Unicode or whatsoever. So why is it so special other than being authors fancy?
