I’ve long been an em-dash user. Probably not always in the right places, but it’s been a habit for years — option + shift + dash is a part of my muscle memory when typing.
But since the rise of AI and the increasing amount of slop making its way onto the internet, the em-dash (as you well know) has become a common tell for when a piece of writing has been outsourced to AI.
As a result, I’ve found myself deleting em-dashes where I’ve used them recently. And the thing that’s weighing on me is that I want my writing to sound like me, but the way I naturally write now might cause the reader to assume I didn’t write it — so I’m second-guessing my own writing habits 🙃
I’m sharing this post as I know others are struggling in various different ways when working with AI, and I want to highlight just one of the many hidden costs of working with more and more with these tools. For the record I am very pro-AI and I think it’s making us all more productive when used deliberately — but it’s not all upside…
🧠 The cost
I spend a big chunk of my day reading and writing. Slack messages, docs, taking meeting notes — so this comes up a lot.
Every time the instinct to em-dash arrives, I stop. Comma? Colon? Semi-colon? Full stop? Or F it and use the em-dash? It’s a two-second decision, which is nothing really, right up until it’s happened twenty times before lunch and I’ve spent a chunk of my scarce writing time thinking about punctuation instead of the thing I was actually trying to communicate.
The problem is I think I’m writing worse in order to seem more human. Which in itself is kind of stupid. And maybe nobody actually cares, but it’s a cost I’ve been carrying more and more recently.
Being occasionally misread costs me less than rewriting myself into something safer, and I’d rather spend my attention on what I’m saying than on how it looks like I said it. So, I’m keeping it. For now anyway. Long live the em-dash and all that.
And yes, there are lots of em-dashes in this post. Maybe I just outsourced the whole thing to Claude anyway 😉