Em Dashes Are Fun to Use — Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise

Ignore the concerns over the long-loved and always-useful punctuation mark

Credit: Thesaurus.com

Are there good reasons to be concerned about AI? Yes and no.

On the yes side, there is a concern within education that students who take online courses are using AI to do their homework.

On the no side, there is the ability of AI to diagnose medical conditions that baffle doctors.

But never mind cheating students and medical investigations for now. I’m here to discuss another AI-related issue that’s causing some consternation of late among lots of people: the em dash. It seems that when people use an AI program to spit out some text (it’s not a good idea to let AI do your writing), the results reveal an overabundance of em dashes. The annoyance has become so great, writes Brent Csutoras, that “humans are ditching em dashes, not because they don’t like them, but because they’re terrified their writing will look fake.”

I work as a freelance copy editor and saw this recently in a request from an author: “no em dashes in prose anywhere.” It’s fine for authors to stipulate certain stylistic things to copy editors, but what’s the problem with em dashes? Well, it seems that em dashes — that’s what you see on both sides of this clause you are now reading — apparently reveal that the prose was written by an AI chatbot.¹

Breaking News: There’s nothing wrong with em dashes. It just all comes down to a judicious use of them, something that an AI chatbot fails at.²

How do I know there’s nothing wrong with using em dashes? Easy: just open up any book by an established and well-regarded author and see for yourself. Really, is there a better way than to look at a few books to show how respectable the em dash is and that it has been used for, like, forever?

Here’s a sentence from Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. The novel was published in 1929:

The Patou frock, certainly — it was much more striking — made me look ineffably slim and yet sufficiently curved.

Here’s a sentence from The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. The novel was published in 1958:

The effect — or rather, the contrast — was somewhat frightening, like seeing a picture of one of those ancient Egyptian princesses quite bald without her headdress.

Here’s a sentence from Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed, from 1966:

George was about to question this — some decisions were best left unmade — but decided to let it go.

This sentence is from Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, from 1979:

Suddenly a glass or china object — an ashtray, a tumbler, I knew not what — crashed and shattered against a wall, and I could hear the heavy male feet stamping toward the door, which flew open in the upstairs hallway.

Here are two sentences from Neighbors by Thomas Berger, from 1980:

He now thought about the situation in this new way: if Harry were truly his neighbor he would scarcely steal the car — unless of course he were insane. Perhaps he was an imposter — and if Harry was one, then it followed that Ramona must be one too, for Harry had mentioned her.

Here’s the beginning of a sentence from The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, from 1988:

Other people remember liking boats, cars, trains, or planes when they were children — and I liked them too — but I was more interested in systems of local transport…”

Here’s the second sentence from The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath, from 1989:

Butlers, I think, are born, not made: the qualities of a good butler — deference, capability, a sort of dignified servility — are qualities of character that arise in cultures where a stable social hierarchy has existed, essentially undisturbed, for centuries.

Here’s a sentence from I Married a Communist by Philip Roth, from 1998:

Well, it’s the earliest images — of independence and freedom, particularly — that do live obstinately on, despite the blessing and the bludgeoning of life’s fullness.

How about some nonfiction? I’ll cite just three examples.

This is from The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford. The book was published in 1944:

But in practice this meant that only a limited group, the free citizens — or at least the wealthy — could live a fully human life.

And here’s a fine sentence from The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. This classic work of philosophy was published in 1949:

Thought the human body is an engine, it is not quite an ordinary engine, since some of its working are governed by another engine inside it — this interior governor-engine being one of a very special sort.

Jumping to the next decade, here’s a sentence from Bertrand Russell’s Human Society in Ethics and Politics. This book was published in 1955:

Such considerations make the application of ethics to politics difficult — so difficult as to seem at times almost futile.

After reading these entries — I could give you many more; all you have to do is ask — there should be only one question that comes to mind: If the em dash worked for these writers, why can’t it work for everyone else?

¹. It’s important to note that not all chatbots are a form of AI. This is a good article that points out the difference between chatbots that function as “if/then” rule-based programs (programmed scripts), from AI chatbots that follow no script and can come up with some original text.

². And then there’s the problem AI programs have with hyphen breaks. I wrote about this here.

Barry Lyons is a freelance writer living in New York City. Have another complaint: “The New York Times and Its Irritating Apostrophe S Policy.”