All for the em dash

The charge that AI-generated writing is full of em dashes is really the elegant mark being misunderstood—again

- Shephali Bhatt

A writer-journalist friend was recently told that something he wrote felt like it was ChatGPT-coded. This was because of his liberal use of the em dash—that long punctuation mark which signals a mid-sentence shift to add emphasis, or to frame a detail too important to sideline.

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of clamour around em dashes showing up frequently in AI-generated writing. The assumption, now gathering steam in certain corners of the internet, is that if you use too many em dashes in your social media posts, you must be using AI to aid your writing.

Furious at the allegation, my friend took to LinkedIn to post a spirited rant—part grammar lesson, part love letter—breaking down the em dash, the en dash, and the humble hyphen.