Bye bye, em dash (—) 👋
I was on Reddit a few weeks back when I stumbled across a thread where people asked, "How can you tell when something is written by AI?" Everyone answered: em dashes and italics.
When I read that, I sort of clutched my pearls a bit. I love an em dash. It's like Adobo seasoning for me. I sprinkle them everywhere. I did realize recently that there was a sudden surge in conversations around the em dash, but I didn't find that concerning. Every decade there's a new grammar or punctuation rule that everyone temporarily obsesses over. I remember when everyone wouldn't shut up about the Oxford comma. So when I started coming across articles that screamed, "The Great Debate: Should we still use em dashes?!" I just waved it off as clickbait.
However, after reading that Reddit thread, I now realize why people are fighting over it. People want authentic writing written by humans, not ChaptGPT. And people don't like feeling like they got "duped," so if they can look for clues to figure out if something is written by AI or a human, they're gonna use those clues.
But here's the problem: I love em dashes! I remember being at a job when an editor showed me how to make one. ("Oh, you just click OPTION + SHIFT + HYPHEN.") It was like magic. I was like, "Ohhh, that's how you make those!" I put them everywhere. I liked how it added a dramatic pause to my writing.
Before, I was a heavy semicolon user. I overused them so much, I was once publicly shamed for it by a college professor. She didn't call me out by name, but loudly in class she announced, "Semicolons separate two independent clauses only." She then looked right at me when she said it.
After that embarrassing moment, I became a parenthesis user. I could squeeze in jokes and extra info, all without ending the sentence. For some reason I hated ending sentences unnecessarily, so I was always looking for tools to keep them going without having to resort to: ", and this happened, and this happened." When I discovered the em dash, it just made writing my rambling, disconnected thoughts so much easier.
There are just so many instances where em dashes come in handy. And they're so much prettier than semicolons or parentheses. They look so sleek and professional. I guess that's why AI stole them...
I'm low-key mad about this! So we just can't use em dashes anymore? We let the machines take them from us?? And we didn't even put up a fight or anything???
Although I'm frustrated, I promise from now on to no longer use em dashes and keep my heavy italics usage to a minimum as well. I don't want anyone to think I use AI. (I mean, I do use AI to research stuff, but not to write.) It just sucks because I feel like from now on there will always be this bubbling paranoia over writing that no writer will ever be able to avoid. I'm genuinely a pro-technology, "embrace the future but let's make it better"-type of person, but I'm wary of the "new normal" this precedent sends.
But whatever. You win, AI. You can have your stupid em dashes.