The Death of the Em Dash
I’m not sure if it’s just how I’m wired, but I’ve always been a great fan of using the em dash. You know the one… right? This guy right here: —
”Option + Shift + _ -” has been my go-to symbol for punctuating two thoughts that should be conjoined. Something along the lines of “He’s a great dog — even if he chews the table legs sometimes.”
To me, the em dash is the perfect way to write the way I speak, and the way I’d like readers to think — to get them closer to my original thoughts as they come pouring out of my fingers and into my Macbook keyboard.
Recently, however, a major technological advancement has made using the em dash a bit of a taboo. ChatGPT, now used commonly in almost every classroom around the US, has a dirty habit of including the em dash in nearly every other sentence it writes. Suddenly, the em dash is everywhere.
Initially, I was joyful. My favorite punctuation mark was finally getting its well-deserved time in the sun. Such a simple mark (it’s literally a long line) that so eloquently mashes two different-yet-similar thoughts together has skyrocketed in usage. What a time to be alive.
Concern swept in before long, however, when I began to realize that the em dash and its usage in sentences had become an almost absolute sign of using generative procedural text apps to write content. Now, every sentence containing this amazing mark was scrutinized immediately for being “AI.”
The thing is, I was using the em dash before ChatGPT was. Some would say I modernized, popularized, and normalized its usage. You probably don’t know anyone who would say this, but some would say it.
Now, each and every time I decide to ”Option + Shift + _ -” between two independent clauses, concern flashes behind my retinas. Will they think this is AI? Do they think that I used ChatGPT to write this Insta caption? Will they believe that I generated this whole blog post?
But I was using it first. All by myself. I was the only one. Well, not the only one.
I’ve seen other writers online lament the death of the em dash thanks to generative text apps, and I can’t help but prepare to join them at the candlelight vigil for the phenomenal long stroke. But I don’t think it’s dead — I believe the em dash is experiencing a renaissance.
If you see an em dash in a block of writing somewhere, please don’t assume that the author decided to haphazardly punch a half-thought-out prompt into a depressing grey window and copy/pasted the results beneath their photo of a dog eating a puppuccino. Rather, choose to believe that they’re intentionally using the greatest punctuation mark to ever exist and make the elipsis, semi-colon, colon, and regular dash obselete.
Unless their em dash is used without spaces before and after it—in that case, the person definitely used ChatGPT and/or is an absolute psychopath.
