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I Love the Em Dash—Too Bad If AI Does Too

I won’t abandon the controversial punctuation mark just to prove I’m human

I HAVE A RECURRING thought while writing now: Is this sentence going to make me look like a robot? The concern usually arrives around the em dash. Once a mark of voice and rhythm, it’s recently acquired a different reputation—one that has less to do with style than suspicion.

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This solitary symbol has divided writers and grammar opinionators for decades. Emily Dickinson’s popular and obsessive use of the line inspired its own field of research among literary scholars—“Dickinson’s dashes.” One New York Times editor scourged his writers for overuse of the device—“it can indicate a profusion of overstuffed and loosely constructed sentences, bulging with parenthetical additions and asides.” And a Slate writer called it their “pack-a-day cigarette habit” that they must quit.

I love em dashes. Even on a superficial level, the sleek, suave em dash feels superior to the homogenous barrage of dots and commas that otherwise constitute the punctuation department of the English language. I quite enjoy its visual audacity. It takes up the most space of all the punctuation marks. In the cyberworld of excess, it draws the eye and commands attention.

Off the page, I’m not especially deferential to rules that feel arbitrary or ornamental (my husband calls me “a natural rebel”). At an all-girls elementary school, where black hair bands were mandatory, I took quiet pride in wearing a coloured one—especially after being called out several times. The em dash does something similar in my writing. It’s unconcerned with blending in.

On a psychological level, the punctuation mark lets me interrupt myself without fully admitting I’ve lost control of the sentence. I think—and write—in fragments and long sentences at the same time. My mind doesn’t move from point A to point B, even though my writing pretends to. I’ve learned—on the page and outside of it—that control reads as competence, and competence is a kind of safety. The dash gives me a way to wander without appearing lost, to detour without seeming unsure. And it helps me ease the reader into that aberration—an extra thought, a qualification, a late-breaking realization—without the dryness of a semicolon or the self-consciousness of parentheses. What those marks soften or apologize for, the dash delivers without asking permission.

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And despite all its versatile uses, the most clutch use of the em dash—for a culture writer who must summon up the courage to publicly espouse her opinions—is its dramatic flair. I usually deploy it around the third or fourth graph of my story, after I latch readers on with an immersive lede, establish the new and noteworthy with a hook, and then finally get down to saying what I have to say about the thing.

“Love, lust, and loneliness—Silicon Valley may have found its next set of visceral human needs to capitalize on.”

Most recently, the internet decided that em dashes belong to large language models. There seemed to be mutual consensus in the online world, somehow from everyone and no one in particular, that frequent em dashes are no longer the result of human behaviour. Any writer still indulging in them would be promptly reclassified as a user of artificial intelligence.

The irony is that em dashes are everywhere in the training data. Books, essays, articles—written by humans who reached for them the same way I do: to think out loud, to hesitate, to qualify, to keep going. AI didn’t invent the em dash—it inherited it.

For a hot second, I considered giving in to the automation panic around the humble grammar tool. But I decided that I wasn’t interested in diluting my sentences to pre-empt an accusation I didn’t agree with, or in abandoning a mark that had done so much of my thinking for me.

In my work, it’s the embarrassing, socially unaccepted friend I continue to keep close. It begs for the successive clause and emphasizes my convictions, whispering to me and my readers, “There, she said it.” No wonder I used fifteen in this essay alone.

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