The Death of the Em Dash (A Casualty of the Algorithm Wars)

 

I used to love the em dash.

Not in some overwrought, writer-y way. I just appreciated its utility. The way it could pause mid-sentence, shift gears, or deliver a punchline. It was punctuation with personality. A little theatrical, sure, but in the right hands it added rhythm. Made prose feel alive.

Then the robots showed up.

Now every piece of content that crosses my desk reads like it was written by the same caffeinated AI having an anxiety attack. Sentence after sentence peppered with em dashes. Thoughts careening from clause to clause with breathless urgency. What was once a subtle tool for emphasis has become the literary equivalent of Valley Girl uptalk (every statement ending with an implied question mark?).

The giveaway isn't just frequency. It's the way AI deploys the em dash as a universal solution. Unclear transition? Em dash. Need to add information? Em dash. Want to sound conversational? You guessed it. The algorithm has learned that dashes feel informal and modern, so it sprinkles them everywhere like semantic seasoning.

This is tragic for several reasons. First, the em dash actually requires restraint. Hemingway used them sparingly. Austen deployed them with surgical precision. In skilled hands, they create genuine pauses—moments where the reader's brain catches up to the writer's intent.(see what I did there?)

But there's a bigger problem. The em dash has become a casualty of the algorithm wars. Writers who once reached for it naturally now hesitate. Will readers assume this is AI-generated? Does this sentence sound too robotic? We're self-censoring based on how we think machines write.

This is backwards. We shouldn't be avoiding good punctuation because bad algorithms overuse it. We should be writing better.

So here's my modest proposal: bring back the semicolon. Embrace the period. Remember that the comma exists for a reason. When in doubt, try one of my favorites: the ellipsis. Use the em dash when it's actually needed, not as a nervous tic.

Let the robots have their breathless, dash-heavy prose. The rest of us can write like humans again.