It’s funny to me how everyone has an opinion once something gets trendy.
The lowly but exquisite em dash is in the spotlight now, and I miss the days when I had to teach new members of my content team the differences and correct use of the hyphen, en dash, and em dash.
The beautiful em dash has come a long way from obsessive use by a few (remember Emily Dickinson poems from your school days?) to the ubiquitous and controversial use now during the rise of generative AI content. The debate rages over whether the “long hyphen” is a surefire sign of an AI author, or whether the em dash is still the property of human writers.
Of course, it’s both. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Claude, do tend to overuse the em dash, but they do so because they’re trained on human writers. And human writers have enjoyed the useful and sometimes whimsical em dash for many, many years.
The em dash isn’t the first punctuation controversy I’ve waded into as an editor. Before the em dash, it was the Oxford comma. Ah, the good ole days debating whether a simple serial comma belongs in lists. (It does.)
Today’s online debate over whether em dashes are a telltale sign of genAI is different from the argument over the Oxford comma, though. The Oxford comma sparked spirited discussions about understanding, intent, and clarity, and the intersection of grammar and typographical efficiency. It was a discussion about communication and readability.
The em dash debate is different since it’s not about how the punctuation is used, but what its use indicates. This makes the conversation both more and less important.
Less so in that its use — or lack thereof — doesn’t cause much, if any, grammatical confusion. Em dashes can often be swapped out for a pair of commas or parentheses with virtually no change in meaning or readability.
The raging debate is more important though, because of what lies beneath the issue. The Oxford comma debate is around clarity, efficiency, and personal preference. The current em dash controversy centers on something deeper — the very humanity of its author.
But why do we care so much? The em dash doesn’t affect the interpretation of a list (as an Oxford comma might). And if you can’t tell whether the content is written by a human or manufactured by generative AI except with the “telltale long dash”…why does it matter?
Because human connection matters.
It’s not really about the em dash. It’s about whether the reader is connecting with a human on the other side of the screen — or interacting with a machine that has been trained to mimic human expression.