Sunday, November 2
Hi, friend.
This morning I saw another cartoon tombstone on LinkedIn proclaiming the Death of the Em Dash.
"You had a good run," the post said. "But AI has
buried you."
People are patrolling the streets, rounding up em dashes like it's CSI: Grammar Unit.
Use one in a paragraph? That means you're secretly AI! You're generating your LinkedIn posts with a boiling cauldron of vibes and predictive text! You're a fake! A phony! Cue the pitchforks! Light the torches! The mob is lurching toward you!
Meanwhile, the rest of us are just out here trying to write like actual humans—messy, rhythmic, gloriously imperfect.
I just used an em dash in that last sentence, see? Like humans do.
* * *
Why does a silly punctuation mark matter?
It matters because of an important secret I'm going to let you in on.
Ready...?
Here it is:
It's 2025. The secret to helping your words actually mean
something (in your newsletters, blog posts, Instagram carousels, closed captions, interpretive TikToks, refrigerator magnets, skywriting, Slack threads, Substacks, Substack comments, commemorative tote bags, passive-aggressive HOA emails, and all the rest) is this:
Understand the rhythm of writing—the beats beneath the words.
But-but-but... Isn't the secret to good writing tool? A hack? A more precise prompt? A paid AI account?
That "understanding" business sounds... non-prescriptive and hard.
Well, writing isn't necessarily hard. But it does require some intention, some thought, some beads of sweat from doing uncomfortable things.
It requires YOU.
Let's back up for a sec: What's an em dash?
The em dash (—) is a long horizontal punctuation mark used to create a break in a sentence.
It can replace commas, parentheses, or a
colon—to add emphasis, to signal a shift in tone, or to set off a side thought.
It's called an em dash because it's roughly the width of an uppercase "M" in the typeface.
The em dash is punctuation with feeling.
It's how writers think on the page. How we change direction mid-thought, add a
beat of surprise, or let a little chaos in for flavor.
Example:
She was late—I know, again!—but at least she brought pickles.
The em dash steps in when nothing else feels quite right. It's part pause, part
pivot, part personality.
Example:
Writing rules are useful—until they're not.
Did you notice how I said "feels quite right" above? That's me listening for the beat.
It takes a while to learn its rhythm.
Ye Olde Grandma Em Dash
The em dash has been around for roughly 400 years—long before Clippy, autocorrect, neural networks, or anyone would ever imagine that punctuation would enrage a mob.
So why do people now think ye olde Grandma Em Dash is a sign of AI writing? Because of a perfect storm of style, superstition, and machine mimicry.
AI models love the em dash... because humans do.
Large language models are trained on millions of human-written sentences. (Mostly stolen, it must be said.)
And we modern online writers use em dashes a lot. They mimic our conversational, emotional, sometimes delightfully digressive voice—the kind that wanders, like it's doing right here—before it then plops into a seat and parks itself.
So when AI learned to "sound human," it picked up our favorite tic: the em dash.
When people started noticing dashes popping up everywhere in ChatGPT writing outputs, they mistook the symptom for the cause.
So before you accuse someone of "writing like AI," ask yourself:
Who's actually robotic? The writer using rhythm and nuance? Or the reader following a rulebook?
* * *
So AI isn't obsessed with em dashes. But am I? Probably.
Know who else was? Emily Dickinson—poet, dog
mom, and sixth cousin (three times removed) to Taylor Swift. (For real. Google it.)
Here's a poem of Emily's you might know. Imagine if Emily were on LinkedIn (LOL). Imagine if she were worried someone might accuse her of being AI. (Imagine!)
Let's look at her work both ways, both with and without em dashes.
Emily's Original (with em dashes):
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.
Emily without em dashes (modernized):
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves
And immortality.
Can you feel the difference? Here's what I notice is different:
- Pacing. With the dashes, each line is a breath. Each has a slow rhythm, reminding me of the clopping of hooves on 19th century
cobblestones.
- Tone. The original makes Death feel... friendly? Almost a companion. The comma and period (no em dash) feel interruptive and abrupt.
- Tension. Each dash is a hinge between worlds: life and death, body and spirit, now and forever.
- Humanity. The em dashes are both pauses and restarts, like thinking itself—like Emily's mind moving from thought to thought while trying to make sense
of the infinite.
To me it feels like this:
With em dashes, Emily's poem is a meditation. Without em dashes, her work becomes a book report summary.
It's wild, right?
The em dash is doing the emotional labor the words
alone can't.
* * *
This isn't a small point. Punctuation isn't about grammar.
Punctuation is a kind of wingman to your words; it helps your words confidently come alive in another's mind.
Punctuation, like writing itself, is less about rules than it is about adding rhythm, taste, and being unmistakably human.
Which is all to say... Justice for Em Dashes!
Notice how em dashes work—whether you're reading them here, on LinkedIn, on a tote bag, in a poem.
Said another way:
You can tell a lot about a writer by how they use an em dash.
You can tell even more by whether they're afraid to.
Be fearless.
