Leave the em dash alone, please

Sophia Mattia,

If you haven’t already heard by this point, the em dash is the distinguishing mark of AI usage in writing. As a writer and em dash enthusiast myself, I am extremely unhappy that AI has taken the em dash hostage for its own petty usage, making me hesitant to use my favorite punctuation mark. 

I don’t understand why AI developers allow the em dash to litter its text, as if it’s this dignified mark of punctuation that only the best writers in the world use. After all, AI writing is modeled after human writing, and the em dash is not as common in writing as AI is making it out to be. I remember being told in my college classes that the em dash could be a sign of weak writing, yet if you ask ChatGPT to generate a paragraph for you about any topic, chances are there will be em dashes within that paragraph. The reasoning behind why a punctuation mark that is supposedly a sign of weak writing would be so heavily incorporated into AI programs that are supposed to “replace” humans, namely writers, one day is beyond me. I’m not saying that ChatGPT is using the em dash incorrectly, more that it’s using it way too commonly for text that doesn’t really need the em dash. 

The em dash isn’t just a mark of punctuation. It is an intrusion of thought. An em dash is used when you have so many ideas flowing through your head that you absolutely must interrupt yourself. A good non-written comparison is when you’re telling a story to your friend, but you have to interrupt the main story with a smaller, side story in order for the main story to make sense. However, on a more grammatical scale, em dashes are used a lot of the time to insert details into a sentence. 

For example, “Sheryll was walking her dog—a chihuahua that’s angry at the world—last night.” or  “Patricia banged on the door three times—she wasn’t happy.” 

If AI isn’t capable of thought, then why is it using a punctuation mark that requires thought so frequently? While it could be said that any punctuation mark requires thought, the em dash is a special case because it’s not one that is usually an immediate go-to, such as a comma or a period. Those have pretty straightforward functions. When using an em dash, you have to make sure it makes sense to use one. If you’re making a list, you need to know why you’re using an em dash instead of a colon. If you’re adding information into a sentence, you need to know why you’re using an em dash instead of parentheses. Also, the details that you’re including after an em dash, or between two em dashes, have to be worth derailing the reader for. While AI is modeling itself off of human writing, it is only capable of generating text, and not thinking about the reasoning behind the punctuation marks that it’s using. 

Please, I beg of AI, leave the em dash alone. Or at least learn how to use it at a normal rate so that I can have my punctuation mark back.

Sophia Mattia

Sophia Mattia is a recent graduate of Drexel University with a BA in English (writing concentration), minors in communication and linguistics, and a certificate in entertainment writing and publishing. She was the editor in chief of Drexel’s newspaper, The Triangle, in her senior year and enjoys writing about the arts, academics, and music. She also writes short fiction and poetry. She hopes to one day write a novel. In her free time, she writes songs and plays piano. She can be found on Bluesky at sophiamattia.bsky.social.

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