My daughter called. It was the usual “how are you” chatter every parent has with a child, not that Erica is a child. She’s in her mid-20s and doing quite well for herself. She has an excellent job, owns a home, and pays her own bills.
What that really means is that my wife and I are “free,” and if you’re a parent of a child who’s gotten along as well as Erica has so far, you know exactly what I mean.
It also means I'm old. Inevitable, I guess. The “old" part.
So, we’re talking, and then she brings up this argument she had with her friends about the em dash. She figured I’d be able to settle the matter.
“You’re a writer, Dad.”
Well… that’s debatable. A writer is a professional. I don’t have a degree in journalism or English, or even English literature, and while I’ve been privileged to hold positions in which I’ve been paid for writing, I’m just someone who puts words together to make sentences. Every now and then, it works out.
Erica likes using the em dash. Me, too. It has a very specific purpose. Her friends, however, argued that the use of the em dash was a sign that your writing was AI-generated, particularly from ChatGPT.
Several alarm bells went off. About her friends. It told me that:
Her friends are not well-versed in the practices of good grammar, syntax, writing mechanics (like punctuation), and sentence structure
It was a worrying sign about public literacy
They may be prone to falling for far too much of what they read on social media
They don’t bother to question whether what they read online is true.
It’s one of the great ironies of the internet: with hardly any effort—and perhaps more willingness than effort—you can research and fact-check anything you read online simply by conducting a thorough search. Online. The hard part isn’t the search; it’s the willingness to do it.
One would think an attorney (one of the “arguers” is an attorney) would know a little something about research. Maybe just on matters of law, and then, maybe only because that’s part of the attorney's job.
Well, English usage has its laws, too, or to put it gently, its rules. And its rule books. The Associated Press has a stylebook. There’s the MLA, the APA, the Chicago Manual of Style. Each one lays out its rules for grammar, citation, and formatting—including rules on the em dash.
Not one of them, however, says: “Hey! If you use an em dash, congratulations, you’re ChatGPT!”
Incidentally, there is no manual or stylebook on how to talk like a New Yorker. If I’m a professional at anything, it’s talking like I’m from New York. This may have something to do with my being a native New Yorker. You got a problem wit dat?
Let’s cut to the chase: The claim that em dashes are a sign of AI-generated writing is a myth. Rubbish. Dashes in a piece of writing neither prove nor even make it likely that something was written by AI.
Period. End of sentence.
It’s not certain exactly where this myth got started, but social media is almost certainly the culprit. Someone, somewhere said something right around the same time AI began to emerge as a part of our daily lives. (ChatGPT was released in 2022.)
“I — keep — seeing — weird — long — dashes — in — posts,” wrote a LinkedIn user on her page several months ago. “Yes, this is the work of ChatGPT,” she claimed, without evidence.
A ChatGPT subreddit popped up.
One poster wrote, “Typically, I and everyone else I know use standard hyphens - like this.” Talk about a clumsy sentence. “I and everyone else”? What are you, special?
Another chimed in: “Let’s be real—nobody uses em dashes in email or comments.” Except, of course, the person used an em dash right after the words, “Let’s be real.” A colon would’ve been the better choice, unless the em dash was a stab at sarcasm. Or just eliminate the words, “Let’s be real.” Say only what you need to say. “Nobody uses them in email[s] or comments.
It’s a cardinal rule in the Strunk & White book, “The Elements of Style” (speaking of writing manuals): Omit needless words, a rule I’m often guilty of breaking, a product of my many years as a radio broadcaster. (That guy talks too much!)
Also, with that sentence, ya gotta go either singular or plural here, because the person wrote “email”—singular—and “comments”—plural. It’s called the subject-verb agreement. Not to be a grammar Nazi about this, but if you’re gonna bag on someone about punctuation, you deserve to be slammed for violating a fundamental rule of grammar.
That’s the thing about online arguments: half the time, the examples prove the opposite of what people are arguing.
I turned to Mignon Fogarty and her excellent blog, “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing” (speaking of writing tools). She’s like a tour guide for the English language. Her blog and podcasts are filled with handy writing tips, fun facts, and she tackles all myths grammatical and syntactical (if you’ll pardon a slight nod to Gilbert and Sullivan). She did some digging on this em dash business and found:
Where the myth likely started
Why AI would use em dashes
What actual clues are more likely to suggest AI writing
Why you should be deeply skeptical of AI detectors
That last one is particularly interesting because there’s an entire cottage industry of websites and apps shouting, “We can detect when writing is AI generated!”
Go ahead, knock yourself out, but be careful. Dozens of stories have popped up about students being falsely accused of using AI to complete writing assignments. The detection software ain’t perfect.
Just for kicks, and at the risk of going to a biased source, I actually went to ChatGPT and posed the question: Is the use of the em dash a sign of AI-generated writing?
I’ll spare you the lengthy response because the short answer was simple: not really.
Human writing → uses em dashes variably, often with style or personality.
AI writing → may use them frequently as a “catch-all” punctuation solution.
👉 In short, the presence of em dashes is not a sign of AI writing. It’s the pattern and frequency of use that might raise suspicion.
That’s a good rule of thumb. All things in moderation. Or as the ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote, "Observe due measure; moderation is best in all things."
It seems the em dash myth’s “breakout moment” was an Instagram video on a popular Gen Z fashion podcast advising people to stop using "the ChatGPT hyphen.” Sounds scary! It's gotten about 2.5 million views.
Here are these fashion editors, designers, trendsetters—whatever they are—prattling on about an em dash appearing in some campaign ad or announcement.
One Instagram poster wrote the perfect response: “What a silly observation from someone who’s never written professionally."
100 percent.
And don’t even get me started on this whole business of what fashion is supposed to be. I’m supposed to wear something because some pretentious, wafer-thin fashionista decided what we should all be wearing this year, and in what color?
I got some advice for ya: There’s a bus in five minutes; be under it.
Speaking of how things look, the em dash gets its name from its width because it’s about as wide as a capital letter M. The not-quite-as-wide en dash is named after the narrower capital letter N. Both serve different purposes in punctuation, but they are not hyphens, which are narrower still and used to connect words to other words. The en dash is typically used between numbers, dates, or other notations to signify "up to and including.”
For example: “The third chapter spans pages 116–134."
We wouldn’t say it as it’s written. We’d say “pages 116 through 134,” but in writing, the en dash does that for you.
Now here’s the other thing about the em dash, and dashes in general. The reason you see it in AI platforms like ChatGPT is that those platforms were trained on human writing. They were programmed, just like you would program a computer. What you put in is what you get back. The writing tendencies you see in AI are the writing tendencies you see in humans, which means humans use em dashes.
You can go online right now and find job openings for people to train artificial intelligence platforms to sound like human beings. They need people for various languages and dialects. Maybe they need a ChatGPT that speaks like a New Yorker. I could do that job.
I mentioned earlier a concern about public literacy regarding my daughter’s friends. These friends of hers were arguing as if no one ever used an em dash until ChatGPT came along. Excuse me, but the em dash has a long literary pedigree. A whole line of canonical authors have leaned heavily on it: Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Herman Melville.
Last I checked, they didn’t have ChatGPT when these people were writing.
They used the em dash for rhythm, interruption, or emphasis, for dramatic pauses, to mimic speech, and to make long, dense prose easier to read. They used it for both creative and practical purposes.
Some standout practitioners of the em dash:
Emily Dickinson—practically defined by her unconventional dash-heavy style.
Henry James—used long, winding sentences often held together with em dashes.
Virginia Woolf—dashes show up frequently in her stream-of-consciousness prose.
James Joyce—especially in Ulysses, dashes punctuate bursts of thought.
Vladimir Nabokov—a big fan of dashes for asides and tonal shifts.
William Faulkner—used them liberally in his sprawling, meandering sentences.
Charles Dickens—often employed em dashes to mimic speech and dramatize pauses.
Kurt Vonnegut—leaned on them in his conversational, punchy style.
Sylvia Plath—especially in her journals and poetry, dashes sharpen sudden turns of feeling.
Herman Melville—in Moby-Dick, dashes interrupt and complicate his dense prose.
Perhaps the most famous “em dash writer” of all is Emily Dickinson. Her use of the em dash became a signature. She used it in her poetry to create a dance of words that gave her writing a sense of immediacy and contemplation all at once—not an easy thing to do. But the em dash makes it work.
It’s a tool for flexibility and voice, not a sign of artificial writing. Or as the person responding to those fashion hoopleheads on the Instagram post wrote, "It’s a softer period. A sassier comma. A way to hold tension or thought without breaking it.”
It’s no small coincidence that Emily Dickinson is a poet my daughter has been fond of since high school.
So the next time someone shouts, “Em dashes are a dead giveaway on all these AI posts!” tell ‘em to do a little research. Tell ‘em not to believe everything they read on social media. Tell ‘em to question everything they read. Or how about you tell ‘em to pick up a book?
Or as I might be prone to tell my daughter's friends: “There’s a bus in five minutes… “ Well, you know the rest.
Great read!
Hilarious! And informative! As a journalism degree holder (Long Beach State), I remember a professor saying, among other uses, we can use em dashes in place of parentheses — to keep the flow of the sentence going without the rude interruption, LOL. As a know-it-all student, of course, I told him “there’s a bus coming…”