There is a very loud campaign underway against the em dash.
You’ve seen it. A raised eyebrow on social media. A snide comment in a writers’ forum. “Ah yes,” someone types, “another em dash. Clearly written by AI.”
The implication being that the humble dash—once the mark of a careful essayist or mildly dramatic columnist—has become the calling card of the robots.
I would like to register a protest.
First, let us be clear about what we’re dealing with.
The em dash—long, confident, slightly theatrical—is not some modern affectation. It predates the internet, the smartphone, and the era in which we decided that “lol” was an adequate emotional vocabulary. It has done solid work for centuries. It has interrupted thoughts, added clarifications, delivered punchlines, and allowed writers to change direction mid-sentence without the embarrassment of a full stop.
The en dash, its slightly shorter and more restrained cousin, has likewise carried its share of responsibility—holding together date ranges, linking ideas, quietly doing the administrative work of punctuation without complaint.
And now we’re deriding them?
The case against the em dash seems to be this: AI overuses it. Therefore, the em dash must be suspect. By that logic, we should also abandon paragraphs, verbs, and the letter “e.”
AI uses those with reckless frequency.
It’s true that artificial intelligence has developed a fondness for the em dash. But let’s think this through. AI systems are trained on older, well-edited documents. Books. Essays. Newspapers from a time when subeditors still wielded red pens with righteous authority. Those heady days when print was king, but I digress …
In other words, AI learned from people who knew what they were doing.
If the em dash appears frequently in that material, perhaps that says less about the dash and more about the standards of editing in the late 20th century.
There is something faintly comic about blaming a punctuation mark for the habits of a machine that learned from us. It’s like accusing the Oxford comma of conspiring with Skynet. I could write an essay about the Oxford comma, but back to the point.
The em dash does something that no other mark quite manages. A comma is polite but limited. A full stop is decisive—sometimes too decisive. A colon announces that something important is coming, which can feel like pressure. The em dash, however, allows a writer to pivot. To add an aside. To undercut their own seriousness. To say, “Yes, I was making a point—but let’s look at it from another angle.”
That flexibility matters. Especially if you write the way many of us do: thinking on the page.
Without the em dash, we would be forced into either clunky parentheses (which feel like we’re whispering from inside a cupboard) or a forest of commas that blur meaning and test the reader’s patience.
And let’s not pretend that suspicion of the em dash is entirely about style. It’s about anxiety. We are living in a moment when we are trying to tell the difference between human and machine. We scan sentences for patterns. We squint at phrasing. We become amateur detectives of syntax.
The em dash has become collateral damage in that search.
But here’s the irony: humans are messy with dashes. We overuse them. We misplace them. We sometimes substitute them for proper structure. AI, for all its faults, often deploys them with unnerving neatness. If anything, the perfectly spaced, impeccably balanced dash should make you more suspicious than the chaotic one dropped halfway through a sentence because the writer changed their mind.
Which, if we’re honest, is exactly what the dash is for.
I am not suggesting we scatter em dashes like confetti. Restraint is still a virtue. A page riddled with them can feel breathless, as though the writer cannot commit to finishing a thought. But used well—judiciously, intentionally—they add rhythm. They create emphasis. They allow tone to surface in ways that more rigid punctuation does not.
I even know the keystrokes to create them (Alt 0151 and Alt 0150 if you’re wondering).
The em dash is not a sign of automation. It is a sign of voice. Of tone and texture. Of thought and afterthought.
And perhaps that’s why I’m fond of it. It reflects how people actually speak: starting a sentence, pausing, adding a clarification, slightly contradicting themselves, pressing on anyway.
So let the robots use it. Let the editors keep it. Let the rest of us continue to deploy it when a comma won’t quite do and a full stop feels like surrender.
The em dash has survived typewriters, desktop publishing, and the death of the semicolon in polite society. It will survive AI suspicion too.
And if that makes me old school—
—so be it.
(PS: The overuse of the em dash in this article is entirely intentional.)
