In defense of the em dash

There’s much agita online about the impact of artificial intelligence on creative works. Now, I’m an engineer, and I’m not totally qualified to speak on philosophical topics such as this. However, there’s one hot-button issue that’s irritating me: the downfall of the em-dash.

In a few short years, this simple piece of punctuation has fallen from an indispensable signifier of well-separated sentences, to an irritating suggestion that a given work was created by a “clanker”. I’m not going to lie — I understand where this is coming from. Certain LLMs, especially ChatGPT, tend to overuse em dashes. This is because em dashes are quite common in the datasets used for early training: much of the text came from high-quality, literary sources where plenty of em dashes were used.

I tend to have a very non-linear thought process — branching out for a “sidebar” and then returning to the main topic. I’m a huge fan of footnotes, margin notes, parentheses, brackets, parenthetical commas, and — yes — the em dash. On MacOS, which is my daily driver, the keyboard shortcut is Option Shift -, and this has been indelibly burned into my fingers’ “muscle memory”. To me, it feels ironic that the em dash is considered a highfalutin’ mark of punctuation, because the way I use it is just the opposite — it’s an admission that I got distracted, I want to interrupt myself; a confession that my train of thought has left the station but will be back momentarily. I’ve always felt weirdly fond of the em dash, and I plan to continue using it.

As a millennial, I’ve seen many memes come and go over the years, but I can’t remember a meme quite like this, creating rules about how we as humans are allowed to express ourselves. I suppose I wrote this article to express my intention to break this rule — a proclamation that I don’t like it, and I will not comply. And isn’t that just about the most human thing there is? 🤖