Em Dashing

This essay reflects on how a relatively recent shift in language has become a surprisingly lively battleground: the use of the em dash in AI-generated writing, notably by ChatGPT, has become a signal to readers that a passage might have been produced by a machine. While some online commentators argue that humans never use this punctuation, experienced writers and editors protest, pointing to literary greats from Dickens to Dickinson who filled their sentences with dashes, arguing that the em dash evokes the rhythms of natural speech and thought better than many alternatives. The debate reveals not just a changing attitude toward punctuation, but a deeper confusion about what writing even is, and who (or what) it’s for as AI increasingly participates in our written conversations.

This linguistic skirmish is emblematic of a broader transformation: in the digital age, vast swathes of what used to be spoken conversation have migrated onto screens. Where writing once meant carefully-crafted, edited, and published text, today it also encompasses emails, text messages, and endless streams of posts, DMs, and chat replies. The majority of a modern person’s “writing” is now effectively informal speech, quick, reactive, and more concerned with immediacy than syntax or literary craft. This everyday writing has its own gorgeous expressiveness, playful forms, and relaxed standards, but it stands in tension with bookish conventions.

Large language models like ChatGPT train on mountains of traditionally composed prose and old print matter, then mimic that style, right down to the nuanced use of em dashes, when asked to generate responses. The spectacle of digital assistants reflecting our literary past back at us, using “outdated” punctuation and orthography, sometimes seems uncanny or even robotic to readers more accustomed to the fast-and-loose typographical style of real-time digital life. We’re left in a strange position: the machines are conserving a literary tradition that digital natives are happy to leave behind.

This punctuation debate is ultimately about more than dashes, it’s evidence of an epochal shift in how we relate to language, writing, and technology. The rise of AI text is forcing us to reconsider what constitutes authentic human expression. Maybe the quirks we now read as a machine “tell” are actually vestiges of our own literary heritage, reminding us that as digital life accelerates, the artifacts of thoughtful, artful writing risk fading into history. As we adapt to this hybrid future, the real story may be how we negotiate the boundary between old and new, formal and informal, human and AI, one dash at a time.