I need to discuss something that has been bothering me for months now. The em dash is getting a bad rap, and it’s time we set the record straight.
The New Paranoia Around The Em Dash
You’ve probably seen the discourse. Someone posts a piece of writing, and within minutes, the replies roll in: “This reads like AI wrote it.” The evidence? Too many em dashes. It’s become shorthand for detecting synthetic text, right up there with starting every paragraph with “In today’s digital landscape” or using “delve” unironically.
A Long History
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been using em dashes long before ChatGPT became a household name. I learned to love them by reading Paul Graham’s essays, Hemingway’s short stories, and countless blog posts from developers who understood that technical writing doesn’t have to be sterile. The em dash isn’t an AI invention. It’s been a workhorse of English prose for over a century.
But now I find myself second-guessing every time my fingers hover over those two hyphens. Should I restructure this sentence? Will people think a language model wrote this? It’s absurd. We’re letting the fear of appearing artificial change how we actually write.
The Backward Logic
The irony is rich. We’re self-censoring our own natural writing patterns because machines have learned to mimic them. That’s backwards. The em dash exists because it’s genuinely useful. It creates rhythm. It handles interruptions and afterthoughts with elegance. It also lets you pack multiple ideas into a single sentence without the formality of a semicolon or the hard stop of a period.
Look at any great writer from the past two decades. They use em dashes liberally. Because they work, they create the conversational flow that makes technical concepts actually readable. The problem isn’t the punctuation mark itself; it’s that we’ve become hypersensitive to patterns that appear in AI output.
Training on Ourselves
And let’s be honest about why AI uses em dashes frequently: because they appear in the training data. Because human writers use them. We trained these models on our writing, and now we’re upset that they write like us. The solution isn’t to abandon perfectly good punctuation. It’s to write with enough personality and substance that no one would confuse you for a bot, regardless of your dash preferences.
What Actually Matters
If em dashes make writing look AI-generated to some people, that says more about how we’ve let paranoia override common sense than it does about general prose. Real writing isn’t about avoiding certain marks or phrases. It’s about having something worth saying and saying it clearly.
When you’re evaluating whether something is authentic, punctuation is the wrong place to look. What matters are the ideas, the experience, the specific observations that could only come from someone who’s actually spent time thinking deeply about a topic. Those are the things no amount of prompt engineering can replicate.
The em dash isn’t the enemy. Bland, derivative writing is. And you can produce that with or without dashes. So maybe instead of policing punctuation, we should focus on substance. Write with conviction. Share real experiences. Have an actual point of view. Do that, and no one will mistake you for a bot, regardless of how many dashes you use.
