In defence of my beloved em dash.

How AI made everyone a typographical detective, and why they're still getting it wrong.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I fell in love with punctuation before I fell in love with words. Specifically, a little horizontal line that was longer than it had any right to be.

The em dash.

Not the hyphen (too short, too functional, the punctuation equivalent of a handshake). Not the en dash (which exists in a kind of punctuational purgatory that even most editors can’t explain). The em dash. The one that lets you take a hard left turn in a sentence, hold a thought hostage for just a moment, and then release it back into the wild like nothing happened.

I’ve been using them for as long as I’ve been writing. They’re the closest thing punctuation has to a dramatic pause. A comma is a breath. A full stop is a rest. But an em dash? That’s the moment in a conversation where someone leans forward in their chair and you know whatever comes next is going to be good.

And then AI came along.

Now, I have no issue with AI (I build the bloody things for a living). But what I do have an issue with is the em dash suddenly becoming the internet’s favourite forensic tool for detecting whether a human being actually wrote something. “Oh, there’s an em dash in the second paragraph? Clearly ChatGPT.” As though a piece of punctuation that’s been in use since the 1700s was invented in San Francisco in 2023.

It’s the intellectual laziness of it that gets me. The idea that you can reduce the question of authorship to a typographical audit. You want to know if AI wrote something? Read it. Does it have a pulse? Does it take you somewhere? Does it make you feel something other than the faint hum of competent mediocrity? That’s your test. Not a bloody dash.

But here’s where I soften.

Because for all the finger-pointing and amateur graphology, something genuinely wonderful has happened. People now know what an em dash is. They can point to it. They can name it. They’ve googled it. They’ve had arguments about it in comment threads. Some of them have even started using it themselves (poorly, but still, progress).

Before 2023, if you mentioned the em dash at a dinner party, you’d get the same look you’d get if you brought up diacritics or the subjunctive mood. Polite confusion followed by a subject change. Now? People have opinions about it. Strong ones. Mostly wrong ones, but opinions nonetheless, and I’ll take passionate ignorance over comfortable apathy any day of the week.

The irony, of course, is that most of the people using the em dash as their AI detection method couldn’t tell you when to use one versus a colon, or a semicolon, or a simple comma. They’ve identified the instrument but have no idea how to play it. It’s like someone pointing at a piano and saying “that’s what robots use” while having never heard a note of Chopin.

My own business partners (who I love dearly, and who are right about most things) once added “avoid over-use of em dashes” to our AI writing instructions. I fought it. I lost. And I add them back in myself afterwards, because some hills are worth dying on, and this one has excellent punctuation.

So here’s my view. The em dash didn’t become less beautiful because an algorithm learned to use it. If anything, it proved what I’ve always believed about it. It’s instinctive. It’s rhythmic. It mirrors how people actually think, in bursts and pivots and interrupted thoughts that circle back around.

The machines learned to love it for the same reason I did.

They just don’t know why.