I have a problem with the em dash. A genuine dislike I’ve sat with long enough that it’s calcified into a position, and I’m comfortable with that.
If you don’t know what an em dash is, it’s this: —. It’s not a dash. It’s not a hyphen. It’s not a key on your keyboard. You have to summon it, Option-Shift-hyphen on a Mac, or let some app decide you wanted one when you typed two hyphens. The fact that it takes actual effort to produce and people still overuse it makes the whole thing worse.
And no, this has nothing to do with AI, I know that’s where your head went. Don’t you worry, we’ll get to that in a minute, but not yet. My problem with this mark is older than any model that learned to use abuse it.
the uninvited guest
The em dash interrupts. That’s what I see it doing, most of the time, whether the writer intended it or not. I hate this cliche but I’m going to use it anyway; most writers treat that as a feature, I think it’s the bug. I think it’s been the bug this whole time, and everyone just sort of agreed not to talk about it.
When a dash cuts into a sentence, I feel the writer losing control of the thought, reaching for the nearest exit because the structure wasn’t figured out. It’s the punctuation equivalent of trailing off and hoping nobody notices. I notice… I notice every damn time.
There’s something visually wrong with it too. A page heavy with em dashes looks cluttered, almost anxious. Commas breathe, periods commit. The em dash just barges in, demanding attention it hasn’t earned. The marks shouldn’t be louder than the meaning.
Commas breathe, periods commit. The em dash just barges in, demanding attention it hasn’t earned.
Good sentences establish relationships between ideas, and the punctuation signals what kind. A comma says “keep going”. A colon says “the second thing explains the first”. A period says “stop”. Each one asks you to decide something about what your clauses mean to each other. Commas are flexible too, eight jobs at least, but grammar constrains which one you’re doing. The em dash doesn’t ask that question, it just separates. The reader infers the relationship, and the writer doesn’t have to commit.
I think writers reach for it because of that, because it lets them skip the part where they figure out what their thoughts actually are. The dash doesn’t force you to be lazy. It offers you the option, an option I think too many writers take.
Here’s what other punctuation asks of you:
A comma says “keep going, this connects.” A colon says “the second thing explains the first.” A semicolon says “these two have equal weight.” A period says “done.”
An em dash says “these things are near each other.” That’s it. The reader infers the relationship. The writer doesn’t have to figure it out.
Every other mark in that list forces a decision. The em dash is the only one that lets you gesture at structure without building any.
sentences, undressed
The examples are everywhere once you start looking. Once you start looking, you’re screwed. You won’t be able to unsee them.
“She walked into the room—nervous, distracted, already regretting it—and sat down without saying a word.”
Two dashes framing a parenthetical that has no business being a parenthetical. That information is the emotional core of the sentence, and the writer buried it in the middle like an afterthought. The dashes say “by the way” when the content says “this is the whole point.”
Restructure it:
“Nervous, distracted, already regretting it, she walked into the room and sat down without saying a word.”
Now the emotional state leads. The reader knows how she feels before she moves. The sentence has a shape. Nothing was lost except the writer’s little moment of feeling clever, and the dashes that let them avoid figuring out where the important part belonged.
Let’s try another one.
“After three years of writing and rewriting, she finally understood what the novel had always been about—herself.”
The dash wants a beat of fake suspense, except “she finally understood” already told you a reveal was coming.
Use a colon:
“After three years of writing and rewriting, she finally understood what the novel had always been about: herself.”
The colon commits. It says the thing that follows is the answer, done cleanly and without the theater.
In both cases, a real sentence was hiding underneath, it’s just that the dashes buried it. If removing them makes a sentence better, they were never doing shit except getting in the way.
If removing them makes a sentence better, they were never doing shit except getting in the way.
the same thought, four commitments
Take a simple idea: someone works hard and gets a result. Watch what happens when you punctuate it differently.
“He worked for ten years, and it paid off.”
The comma connects. Cause flows into effect. One continuous thought.
“He worked for ten years. It paid off.”
The period separates. Two distinct facts. You feel the weight of each one landing independently.
“He worked for ten years; it paid off.”
The semicolon balances. These two clauses have equal weight. The structure says “both of these matter the same amount.”
“He worked for ten years—it paid off.”
The dash does… what, exactly? It’s not connecting like the comma. It’s not separating like the period. It’s not balancing like the semicolon. It’s just there, and you’re supposed to figure out what it means.
That’s the problem. Three marks committed to a relationship. One didn’t.
the two times it actually works
I’ll grant two cases where the em dash earns its keep.
First: interrupted dialogue. “I was just about to—” “No, you weren’t.” The dash shows the cut-off. Nothing else does that job as cleanly. Fine, use it there.
Second: genuine tonal whiplash, where you want the reader to feel the sentence break its own neck. A deliberate, violent pivot that wouldn’t work with a comma or period because you need the abruptness to land.
Except maybe five percent of em dashes I see in the wild are doing either of those jobs. The other ninety-five percent are just… there. Not interrupting. Not pivoting. Just separating two things the writer didn’t feel like connecting properly. The mark has two legitimate uses and gets deployed for everything.
enter the machines
And then the LLMs showed up, and a mark that was already being misused by people who should know better started getting generated by things that will never know anything at all.
LLMs are trained on published, edited prose: essays, articles, books, the kind of writing that goes through multiple drafts and lands in print. Em dashes appear disproportionately in that register because they look sophisticated. They signal “I am a writer who knows about em dashes.” The mark became part of the pattern for “sounds like a real writer.”
So the models learned to use it. Not because it’s good. Because it’s common in a certain kind of text. They’re cargo-culting sophistication, pattern-matching the surface features of polished writing without understanding what any of it means. Frequency in the training data doesn’t mean the mark is doing work. It means the mark showed up a lot in the kind of writing that got scraped.
Here’s an Amazon review, probably run through one of those “AI writing assistants”:
“I’ve tried a lot of blenders and this one is genuinely different—powerful motor, no leaking, easy to clean. My last one died after six months, but this seems built to last. The lid is a bit hard to remove—not a dealbreaker, just worth mentioning.”
Why does that feel AI-generated? Not just because of the dashes. Because the dashes don’t add anything.
“Powerful motor, no leaking, easy to clean” could be a comma list. “The lid is a bit hard to remove” could start a new sentence. The dashes aren’t interrupting, pivoting, or connecting. They’re just there, signaling “I am writing in a sophisticated way” while doing zero semantic work.
That’s the tell. Not frequency alone. It’s em dashes used where they add nothing. A human might overuse them, but they’d at least sometimes land, sometimes mean something. A model uses them because they’re in the pattern, every time, whether they belong or not.
Open any model-generated essay. Within a few sentences, you’ll find one. You can watch them stack up, one per paragraph, sometimes two, never zero. The whole point of having a toolkit is choosing the right tool. A spoon, a fork, a knife. A language model just dumps the entire drawer and hopes something fits.
nothing, confidently
The em dash doesn’t name the relationship between two ideas. It signals that two ideas are near each other and leaves the rest to whoever’s reading. It’s the only punctuation mark that lets you gesture at structure without building any. Like literary jazz hands.
I notice every em dash I read. I notice them the way you notice a loose thread on a sweater. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you start looking, they’re everywhere, in essays, in articles, in reviews that were definitely “cleaned up” by something that doesn’t understand language.
If your favorite punctuation mark is also the favorite punctuation mark of a system that has no idea what words mean, maybe the mark isn’t doing what you think it’s doing.
I don’t use them. I don’t miss them. And every time I take one out of a sentence and the sentence gets better, I know the truth: it was never doing shit except getting in the way.