craigmcn

I have complicated feelings about the em dash. I use it, but sparingly, and only when I want to capture a thought interrupting itself, a pause with more weight than a comma but less finality than a period. What I don’t want is for my writing to read like it came out of a chatbot, which is apparently now a real concern if you reach for that particular piece of punctuation too often.

A recent 99% Invisible episode traces the em dash back to 11th-century Italy, through Shakespeare’s First Folio, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems, where it captured pauses, interruptions and the speed of human thought. It has been doing honest literary work for centuries. The problem is that AI language models trained on digitized classic literature picked up the habit right along with everything else, and now use em dashes so relentlessly that people call it the “ChatGPT hyphen.” A Portland journalist who writes his newsletter by hand, after 40 hours a week visiting grocery stores in person, was accused of using ChatGPT because of his em dash usage.

What makes it worse is that many people had likely never encountered an em dash before they started seeing it constantly in ChatGPT responses, so to them it reads as a marker of AI writing. The causality is exactly backwards. AI adopted the em dash from centuries of human literature. Blaming the punctuation is the wrong diagnosis. The actual tells of AI-generated writing are subtler: a certain blandness, an absence of genuine point of view, an over-formal register that sounds like no one in particular. While we’re on the subject, the en dash deserves more credit too. It is not a hyphen and not an em dash. For numeric ranges (pages 12–15, years 2019–2024), a properly set en dash is the correct mark, and keyboards don’t make it easy, but it’s worth the effort.

My advice, for what it’s worth: use the em dash when it’s the right tool, and not otherwise. Don’t avoid it just because a language model overuses it. That’s letting the robots win.