"Em dashesoften used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they're the width of your average lowercase m'are probably my favourite bit of punctuation. I've been option + shift + hyphening them for years. A person's writing often reflects how their brain works, and mine (when it works) tends to work in fits and starts. My thoughts don't arrive in perfectly rendered prose, so I don't write them down that way."
"The reason AI is so hung up on em dashesas you might expectis because humans were first. Large language models were trained on vast swathes of actual writing, including mine, I suppose, with the result that em dashes got baked into algorithms from the beginning. It's flattering, in a way. Humans used them so often that AIs learned them as a default natural flow, Brent Csutoras notes on Medium. It's like asking a bird not to chirp."
"Well, my chirping days are over. It seems I have two choices nowkeep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. Staccato flow. Full stops everywhere. Nope, that sucks too."
An editor requested removal of em dashes because readers assume their presence indicates AI-generated text. Em dashes serve to connect explanatory phrases and are valued as a favored punctuation; they are typed via option+shift+hyphen by many users. Writing habits reflect cognitive patterns, with thoughts arriving in fits and starts that em dashes accommodate. Large language models learned em dash usage from extensive human-written training data, causing em dashes to appear as default output. Writers face a choice: retain em dashes and risk client rejection, or alter sentence rhythm using commas, semicolons, ellipses, or full stops, thereby changing personal style.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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