In Defense of Em Dashes

Your—Communication—Style—Is—Legally—Protected—By—International—Human— Rights—And—There—Are—Neurodiverse—Specific—Laws—To—Protect—Human—Rights—And—Not—Only—Is—This—Grammatically—Correct—It—Is—Your—Legal—Right—And—Makes—Your—Writing—More—Accessible—Because—Pissing—Whiners—Off—Is—Our—Civil—Duty.

—Internet Joke

Here’s what makes this awful. Em dashes used to signal care. Effort. Someone who edits their sentences. Now they signal the opposite—a craftsmanship marker inverted into suspicion.

Most of us posting online aren’t professional writers (in the sense that we’re getting paid to post). So why are we surprised to discover that most posts aren’t written professionally?

That’s just the moment we’re in: everyone is suddenly a “writer.”

I’ve had em dashes in my writing for 10 years. Will I keep using them? Yes. Will it sit in the back of my mind that readers suspect what I’m writing is AI generated? No. If I have your trust and attention, then you know what I’m writing is me. But to the new reader who is a skeptic? Sure.

Here’s the thing: AI detection doesn’t work. Try it yourself. Write something using nothing but spell-check, throw in a few em dashes with spaces, and you’ll get flagged as AI. Run actual AI-generated text without em dashes through the same tool and you’ll come back clean.

And so, we default to being skeptics and critics when we don’t understand the rules—punishing punctuation in the process.

Good writers who have consistently shown up—because that’s what it takes—aren’t upset about AI showing up. Because good writers also know: it was never about the punctuation.

For me, Word’s spell-check helped me get the right spelling on the page. Grammarly helped me learn syntax. My sentence arrangements were awful for years and got better once I started using it. AI helps me enrich my ideas, gives me a research assistant to bounce things off. I love the back and forth. When used correctly, it pokes holes in your point of view that you then need to level up.

AI writing makes everyone’s writing average. Not good. Average. That’s the bar now, and it’s raised. AI can’t replace your voice. We need your voice to contribute.

Until then, leave our em dashes alone.