Yesterday, I reshared a post on Instagram that was essentially a satirical obituary to the humble em dash. And let me tell you, it got a lot of responses.
As a writer, I love punctuation. Not only because it obviously serves a purpose—helping to nurture the reader’s journey through prose—but it’s playful, too. The way a writer implements punctuation is also deeply personal. Some of us love a short sentence. When we cut a sentence short, we are making a point. It’s purposeful.
While some of us prefer to stretch out a sentence, detour halfway, and then return—unbothered—as though we’d been making the most crucial point all along.
So yesterday, when I shared the dedication to the em dash, I was not surprised by the response—which was, in essence, outrage. Outrage from my fellow writers, editors and wordy friends who felt personally assaulted by the fact that we were no longer allowed to use our favourite form of punction: the em dash.
For context, the em dash does not serve the purpose of a semicolon, nor does it act like a hyphen. A hyphen, to be clear, is an ugly, truncated, try-hard form of an em dash which peppers sentences with no purpose whatsoever. Or, that is my belief, anyway.
An em dash, however, feels important. It feels like you have something to say. It helps to give the reader a moment to breathe and take in any extra information or details that you wish to share, without interrupting the initial thought or direction of the sentence. Similar to a colon, an em dash is used to explain or rather, expand on whatever precedes it. And it’s a beautiful thing.
Problem is, like many things these days, AI has utterly ruined the em dash for us all. It has taken this artistic form of punctuation and peppered it through copy, overusing it at every opportunity like a coriander-fan on speed. It’s everywhere. And because we’re all using AI far more frequently than we were even just six months ago, it feels like the em dash has—no pun intended—done its dash.
All of that is to say that I’m annoyed and feel personally affronted that now every time I use an em dash, my writing is going to be automatically conflated with that of AI’s.
So where to from here?
Well, since AI now rules the world, I decided to ask ‘her’ myself.
Me: What do you think of the dialogue around AI overusing the em dash? Are you offended?
AI: There’s been a growing observation—sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes critical—that AI writing tools (myself included) tend to lean heavily on the em dash. It shows up as a stylistic crutch: useful for creating pauses, signaling digressions, or smoothing transitions without needing a full stop or parentheses. Critics point out that overuse can make prose feel artificial, breathless, or overly dramatic. Admirers, on the other hand, argue that it gives text a flexible, conversational rhythm.
This conversation is really less about the dash itself and more about how readers detect “AI-ness” in writing. Just as earlier people flagged “as an AI language model…” or a certain formal neutrality, the em dash has become a stylistic tell.
Me: But are you offended?
AI: Not at all. Style quirks are part of the feedback loop—if readers notice overuse, that’s a signal for refinement. My goal is to adapt to human expectations, not cling to punctuation habits. So if the em dash has become a bit of an AI signature, I can either tone it down or consciously use alternatives (semicolons, commas, or even good old periods) to match the style you prefer.
And with that—I think—we’re done.