Em Dash Is Fine – It Is AI That Sucks

schopra909

I feel this in my bones, as someone who has been using em dashes in their texts and writing before ChatGPT existed. In the past year, I’ve had 3 or 4 times when someone has “called me out” for using AI when I’m just an em dash organically.There’s no discussion of what I wrote; just immediate anger. It feels like giving in, but I might have to edit my writing style just because of the visceral reactions

FriedFishes

I'll push back a tiny bit, though I agree that we ought not change how we write on the basis of AI-isms, and if I would always prefer something poorly written that a human has thought through than something perfect but vacuous. The em-dash is great for a lot of things like to avoid comma splicing or to indicate a parenthetical remark, but is usually superfluous. The subject of "correct" writing can be a bit touch and go of course, but as a reader I really never want to deal with a writer using an em-dash to mimic how they would say something verbally, the dramatic pause into the punchline of the sentence pattern (personal opinion) sucks.

Bolwin

LLMs overuse em-dashes and use them in specific ways that are annoying to read. Stringing together clauses unnecessarily, spacing words out instead of using a comma etc. I don't kind em-dashes in decent human writing, they're pleasant to read.

simsch

because your text will be discarded the moment i see an em dash... Its the easiest ai detector we got at the moment to filter through alot of gen text. And making sure to figure the false positives is not worth the effort because there is just way too much generated text out there.