The Em Dash Didn’t Do Anything Wrong

I have been using em dashes since a sophomore English teacher wrote “nice—keep doing this” in the margin of an essay about The Great Gatsby. I was sixteen. ChatGPT did not exist. Neither, for most practical purposes, did the internet as we now know it.

So it has been strange to watch the em dash become a crime scene.

How a dash became a “tell”

The logic is simple and, like most simple logic about AI, mostly wrong. Chatbots, people noticed, use a lot of em dashes. Therefore text with a lot of em dashes was probably written by a chatbot. Threads appeared listing “AI tells” — the em dash near the top, alongside words like delve and phrases like it’s important to note. Screenshots circulated of LinkedIn posts with the dashes circled in red.

Then the advice started: remove your em dashes so people don’t think you used AI. Writers who had used them for decades started swapping them for commas, parentheses, or nothing at all, like people scrubbing a fingerprint off a doorknob they had every right to touch.

Where the dashes actually came from

Language models write the way they do because they learned from us. They have read an enormous amount of published prose — journalism, essays, fiction, the kind of polished nonfiction that runs on dashes. Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts are famously full of them. So is a great deal of magazine writing. The models did not invent the habit. They inherited it, along with our fondness for lists of three and our tendency to say “in conclusion.”

Treating a dash as evidence of a machine is like treating a semicolon as evidence of a lawyer. It tells you something about style. It tells you nothing about authorship.

If your detection method would convict Emily Dickinson, it is not a detection method.

The real cost of “tell” hunting

This would be harmless pedantry if it stayed in comment sections. It doesn’t. Teachers, editors and hiring managers absorb these lists. A student who writes in a polished register — often the student who worked hardest on it — becomes the suspect. A freelancer with a fondness for dashes gets a terse email from a client.

Meanwhile, anyone actually trying to pass off machine text just deletes the dashes. The tells that become famous are the tells that get scrubbed first. Every viral list of “signs it’s AI” is, functionally, a free tutorial for the humanizer industry.

A modest proposal

Use the em dash. Use it wherever it helps a sentence breathe or pivot or land a punch. If someone accuses you of being a robot because of your punctuation, show them your drafts, your notes, your version history — the actual evidence of how writing happens.

And if you are the one doing the accusing, ask yourself a harder question than “does this look like AI?” Ask: “What would I need to see to be sure?” If the answer is a dash, you were never going to be sure of anything.