In Defence of the Em Dash

This is a tale of punctuation.

A small one — a dash, to be precise. The em dash, for those still confusing it with the hyphen. A mark so modest it doesn’t even have its own key, and yet lately it’s been put on trial like a criminal.

Apparently, it’s now the universal coded signal that something was — shock horror — written by a large language model.

If you use one — just one — readers are now encouraged to assume you’re a robot. A fraud. A gutter rat passing their forgeries as authenticities. That’s the logic. A single horizontal line in your sentence, and you’ve revealed yourself to be synthetic.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the em dash has existed for centuries. It did not crawl out of a chatbot last Thursday. It’s not a glitch, or a gimmick, or some clunky “AI tell.”

It’s a versatile, well-established piece of punctuation that’s been quietly doing excellent work for generations. It required no fanfare, no ballyhoo, just a quick little double tap of the hyphen key, and voila: a cut, a pivot, an interruption, a reframe. It holds a beat. It softens a blow. It introduces the dramatic pause — without shouting about it.

It’s not flashy. It’s not needy. It’s just — right.

And I meet the pearl-clutching cry of “AI wrote this!” with the same weary composure as a maître d’ who’s been asked, for the third time, if the kitchen does chips.

The Charge

The em dash stands accused of being artificial — suspicious, robotic, and overused.

Its plea: not guilty, and a little offended.

Let’s call the witnesses.

“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”
Emily Dickinson

“There she blows!—there she blows!”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass — a idiot.”
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such prospects?”
George Eliot, Middlemarch

So, unless anyone’s suggesting that Charles Dickens used AI to write Oliver Twist, I fail to see the significance of the observation.

In my day job — I write content for a marketing firm — I encounter a certain kind of client who recoils at the sight of an em dash. Or, as they often call it, “that weird long hyphen.”

Aside: The em dash is not a long hyphen. Calling it that is like calling a cello a very big violin. If you’re going to insult the dash, at least get its name right.

In this client-facing role — one that does occasionally make use of AI tools when appropriate — I find it increasingly difficult to explain why we shouldn’t be limiting our punctuation purely out of fear that it might resemble machine-generated text.

This kind of self-censorship inevitably leads to the deliberate dumbing-down of written work — whether that’s copy, prose, or poetry — simply to avoid labels being foisted on the writer.

If your first creative concern is “I hope this doesn’t sound like AI,” then you’re already stuck. You’ve built the trap before writing a word. You’ve placed the theoretical analysis of your work before the literal work itself, and all before you’ve even begun.

That’s not good.

It’s very poor, in fact.

Why It’s Everywhere

Short answer: because it works.

The em dash is the Swiss Army knife of punctuation — it replaces commas, brackets, colons, and semicolons without fuss.

If AI systems favour it, that’s not a sign of bad writing. It’s a sign that the dash gets things done. And in a world where many people still type ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’, that’s hardly something to sneer at.

It also invites resentment. I published my first book in 2021 — republishing it a couple of years later, three and a bit years in total, of writing, editing, reworking, trimming, and reading things out loud until they finally rang true. The em dash appears throughout — especially in dialogue — and for good reason. Nothing else captures the rhythm of thought quite like it.

It interrupts better than a comma, lands lighter than a full stop, and does more than parentheses ever could. When a character is panicked, flustered, hesitant — when they contradict themselves halfway through a sentence or abandon one thought for another entirely — the em dash is there, carrying the turn without breaking the beat.

It’s not just decorative. It’s structural. It helps tell the story, communicating tone, emphasis and emotion to the reader without words, just a little horizontal line.

So yes — I’ll admit it bothers me that someone might read that work and dismiss it outright because of a completely misguided assumption, fuelled by some trending internet factoid about how “AI uses lots of dashes.” I know slights like that are pride-based and best ignored. But it’s hard not to wince when you realise someone might toss out four years of work over a punctuation myth.

Because here’s the other thing: maybe AI leans on the em dash not because it’s faking anything — but because it’s learned something. Maybe it keeps returning to that particular mark because, on balance, it knows what works.

The dash isn’t artificial. It’s just efficient.

Actual Signs of AI Writing (If You’re Worried)

If you’re genuinely worried something was written by AI, I’d advise looking beyond a single em dash. The more obvious tells are elsewhere — and they’re not shy.

Start with the rambling. Sentences that go on far too long without ever quite arriving. Paragraphs that feel like they’ve been padded with newspaper. Five variations of the same phrase stacked like cushions. And that peculiar fondness for ending every article with a bloodless moral takeaway — usually along the lines of:

“This serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of ignoring such and such in today’s ever-changing landscape.”

Quite.

Or take the ad copy, which tends to fall apart in more creative ways. You’ll get gems like:

“This isn’t just a chair. It’s calm. It’s comfort. It’s the sit-down of a generation.”

Or:

“This candle isn’t just wax and wick — it’s a flicker of hope at the end of a long, scentless day.”

There’s also the classic synonym-glut: where a dog no longer barks, but “issues a vocalisation”; where a person isn’t tired, they’re “experiencing post-activity fatigue.”

You’ll also see synonym-stuffing in place of actual description — because AI, when undercooked, doesn’t think. It mimics. And most writing on the internet is generic, so guess what you get when a machine tries to sound “human”?

More generic writing.

Flat adjectives. No voice. No rhythm. No variation in sentence length. Absolutely no shame about saying “leverage innovative solutions” without a trace of irony.

Every piece of copy starts sounding like the corporate jargon regurgitated by the CEO at the annual gala while everyone is sitting in silence, waiting patiently to get absolutely sloshed.

“Here at Morgasby Financial Solutions, we’re more than just a business—we’re a family built on five core values.”

Usually some combination of teamwork, integrity, respect, innovation, excellence, responsibility, accountability, and, when they’re feeling especially virtuous, sustainability.

None of which means anything, of course. They’re just business Mad Libs, shuffled and recycled until the sentence has all the sincerity of that £300-a-day remote job listing you saw on LinkedIn.

AI didn’t invent that style—it inherited it. Like a child retelling his uncle’s dull fishing story because it’s the only one he’s ever heard.

And that’s the problem. It mimics mediocrity with stunning accuracy.

These are the true fingerprints — not whether someone used a dash.

But like any tool — even the new scary ones — you get out what you put in. Garbage prompt, garbage output. Nuance in, nuance out. That’s not sinister. That’s predictable. And it has nothing to do with punctuation.

A Quick Reference

• Hyphen (-): joins words → blue-green, long-form, mother-in-law
• En dash (–): spans values → 1914–1918, London–Paris, Monday–Friday
• Em dash (—): interrupts, reframes, pivots → I was going to explain — but you know what? Never mind.
• Colon (:): unveils → There are three rules: clarity, rhythm, restraint
• Semicolon (;): balances → I was early; the train was not
• Parentheses ( ): whisper → (Only if you’re genuinely whispering.)

If the em dash feels like the cleanest choice — it probably is.

Closing Statement

So — justice for the em dash.

It is not a tell. It is not a quirk. It is not some suspicious, unnatural intrusion in your sentence, and it’s not a sign that robot uprising is at hand. It’s punctuation. Functional punctuation.

Functuation, if you will.

It has style. It has restraint. It asks for nothing, except to be used correctly — and, if possible, not referred to as a ‘weird long hyphen’ by people who ought to know better.

Use it with rhythm.
Use it with care.
Use it like you’ve read a book before.

For anyone still confused, here’s a delightfully brief video explainer that’ll sort you out in under a minute.

Court adjourned.

Thanks for reading — and if you’ve made it this far, I hope I haven’t come across as a completely opinionated arsehole. Just a slightly tired writer with a mild tism.

JR Leach is a fantasy author and graphic designer whose debut novel The Farmer and the Fald was published earlier this year. You can follow him on Twitter or Substack and see more of his work on his website

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