The humble em dash is being used as a tell that something is written by a large language model. But it’s James Shackell’s favourite piece of punctuation, and he’s not ready to lose it
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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.
