My editor’s email started off friendly enough, but then came the hammer blow: “We need you to remove all the em dashes. People assume that means it’s written by AI.” I looked back at the piece I’d just written. There were dashes all over it—and for good bloody reason. Em dashes—often used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they’re the width of your average lowercase ‘m’—are probably my favourite bit of punctuation. I’ve been option + shift + hyphening them for years.
A person’s writing often reflects how their brain works, and mine (when it works) tends to work in fits and starts. My thoughts don’t arrive in perfectly rendered prose, so I don’t write them down that way. And here I was being told the humble em dash—friend to poorly paid internet hacks everywhere—was now considered a sign not of genuine intelligence, but the other sort. The artificial sort. To the extent that I have to go through and manually remove them one by one, like nits. The absolute cheek. Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI—I’m losing grammar too.
Why couldn’t machines have embraced the semicolon? No one gives a fig about those.
The reason AI is so hung up on em dashes–as you might expect–is because humans were first. Large language models were trained on vast swathes of actual writing, including mine, I suppose, with the result that em dashes got baked into algorithms from the beginning. It’s flattering, in a way. “Humans used them so often that AIs learned them as a default natural flow,” Brent Csutoras notes on Medium. “It’s like asking a bird not to chirp.”
Well, my chirping days are over. It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. Staccato flow. Full stops everywhere. Nope, that sucks too. Sounds like someone flicking between radio stations.
Oh, em dash—what will we do without you?