Alright, sit yourselves down and let me tell you about the latest load of absolute codswallop bouncing around the internet.
You see, I’ve always been a fan of a proper good yarn—and when you’re writing, you need the right tools for the job. For centuries, real writers have had this brilliant little secret weapon: the em dash. You know the one, that lovely long horizontal line (—) that lets you change direction in a sentence faster than a whippet chasing a hare. It’s like a raised eyebrow, a sharp intake of breath, or a sudden, dramatic pause before you deliver the punchline.
But now? Some bright sparks online are trying to tell us the em dash is dead. And guess who apparently murdered it? Artificial Intelligence.
Aye, you heard me right. The bots have gone and ruined punctuation.
According to a load of folk on Reddit, LinkedIn, and what’s left of Twitter, if you use an em dash in your writing now, it’s a dead giveaway that you didn't actually write it. Gen Z are even calling it the “ChatGPT hyphen.” The theory goes that because the em dash isn't right there on a standard mobile keyboard, no "normal" human would ever bother to use it. So, if one pops up, it must be a chatbot trying to look clever.
It’s got so bad that professional writers are panicking, twisting themselves into knots, and stripping em dashes out of their work just to prove they’re flesh and blood. They’re running scared from a proper piece of grammar because they’re terrified of being called a fake.
Honestly, it makes my brain ache.
The only reason ChatGPT and all them other AI models use the em dash so much is because they were trained on good human writing. They read Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and centuries of brilliant literature where the em dash was the king of creating rhythm and flow. The machine didn’t invent it; it just copied us because we used it so well!
To say we should stop using the em dash because AI likes it is like saying we should stop eating Sunday roasts just because a robot figured out how to mash a potato. It’s bleeding soft.
This whole business is a proper modern witch hunt, and the poor em dash is being burned at the stake for no good reason. Some tech-heads are even sharing "prompts" and bits of code to force AI to stop using them, swapping them out for commas or hyphens. But you can't just swap 'em! A hyphen joins things together; an em dash blows things apart. They aren't the same thing at all.
At the end of the day, looking for em dashes to spot AI content is looking at the wrong blooming thing. The real "tell" that a machine wrote something isn't a bit of punctuation—it's when the writing has absolutely no soul. It’s when a piece of text uses flashy words but says absolutely nothing of substance. It’s the lack of an original thought, a personal story, or a bit of grit.
A robot can copy my punctuation, but it can’t copy my life. It hasn't worked a twelve-hour shift, it doesn't know the taste of a proper brew, and it certainly doesn't feel the rhythm of a good conversation the way a human does.
So, I’m drawing a line in the sand. You can come for my pension, you can come for my local, but you can keep your hands off my em dash. I’ll keep using it whenever a sentence needs a bit of a kick—and if anyone thinks a chatbot wrote this, they can come and tell it to my face.
Long live the em dash, guys and gals. Don't let the machines take it from us.
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