I have a major problem with the em dash. It’s not just some kind of preference that I could be talked out of, but a deep, burning dislike that I’ve come to realize I’m far more aggressively principled about than I first thought.
It’s a crutch. Somewhere along the line everybody agreed to call it a flourish.
And before you ask: no, none of this has anything to do with AI. I know that’s where your head went, because “Wow look at em dash, must be AI writing” is currently in vogue. My issue with this godforsaken punctuation mark goes much, much older than any model that learned how to use abuse it.
But don’t you worry, we’ll get to the AI part…eventually.
An em dash is this: —. It is not a dash, not a hyphen, not a dedicated key on your keyboard.
You either have to actually summon it (Option-Shift-hyphen on a Mac), or like many people claim, they type two hyphens and some app or keyboard decides to autocorrect it.
Alright, class is in session, let’s begin.
the uninvited guest
The core of my dislike for the em dash is that it interrupts something pretty much every time I see it. You literally can’t convince me otherwise.
I think most writers seem to find the interruption “exciting”, or “refined” or “clever”.
I’ve always found it obnoxiously lazy. And I don’t think people who use them are being especially honest with themselves about why they’re doing 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. The writer is hoping nobody notices. I notice every damn time.
It’s not just the grammatical angle, it’s the visual part of it. Em dashes are (to my eye) ugly as hell, making a body of text look cluttered, choppy, maybe even straight up anxious.
Let me put it this way: commas let things breathe. Periods commit. Even a colon or a semi-colon helps bridge. How you transition between two thoughts is what picks the mark.
In my writing experience, if the primary goal is to say “these things are broadly near each other”, you can accomplish this just fine with a comma, parentheses, colons, semi-colons, even a freaking ellipsis. Using one of those is, to me, commitment.
But an em dash? Like a bull in a china shop it just barges in, demanding attention it hasn’t actually earned. And it never actually has any rationalization for why it’s there. It’s just sort of…there, and I think that’s why a lot of people reach for it. It lets you skip the part where you work out what you actually meant.
sentences, unblocked
Once you start noticing this you sort of can’t stop, and I’m honestly a little sorry about what the next few paragraphs are going to do to your reading experience.
Let’s start with the irritating baseline:
“She walked into the room—nervous, distracted, already regretting it—and sat down without saying a word.”
Two dashes just buried her. You’re moving through a sentence about somebody walking into a room, and then the description of how she’s feeling ambushes you from the middle of it. Then it quietly disappears, and you’re supposed to act like nothing happened.
Want to know what it feels like for me to read that? Here.
“Nervous, distracted, already regretting it” is the emotional core of the entire sentence. The dashes are politely saying “by the way”, while the context is basically screaming “this is the whole point.”
What if we tried making it flow a little better?
“Nervous, distracted, already regretting it, she walked into the room and sat down without saying a word.”
See that? Now the emotional state leads. You know how she feels before she moves, which sets the stage for her walking into the room (and maybe even gesturing at why she sat down wordlessly). Nothing had to disappear, and nothing got lost in the trade except the writer’s little moment of feeling clever.
Here’s another one, and I think this one’s worse, because you can see the writer was this close to getting it right:
“After three years of writing and rewriting, she finally understood what the novel had always been about—herself.”
The dash is going for a some kind of…I don’t know, suspense, I guess? Except “she finally understood” already told you a reveal was coming, so you built this stupid drumroll into the sentence and then asked the punctuation to do the exact same job a second time. I mean…just, why?
Let’s just make one single change:
“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 after me is the answer, without the needless theater and without losing the power behind the intent. As far as taste goes, personally, I’d like to see an ellipsis here instead of a colon, but I’ll concede that it works just fine.
Just take a step back and notice what just happened in each of those examples. Removing the em dash didn’t make the sentence worse, it did quite the opposite. If removing a piece of punctuation makes a sentence flow better (and yes, I realize this is subjective), then in my mind it was never doing anything worth a damn to begin with.
two facts and a shrug
Let’s talk about another place the em-dash rears its ugly head: comparisons and contrasts.
Here’s a sentence somebody actually wrote, and I’d bet money you’ve seen one like it before.
“The app shipped on time—the tests never ran.”
And? What exactly am I supposed to do with that?
Hold onto that, because I want to walk through what they could have written instead.
Let’s try something different.
“The app shipped on time, but the tests never ran.”
The comma plus a but flat out contradicts. It shipped despite the tests, and you’re being told which half to trust. No guessing, no weird interruption. Beautiful.
Why don’t we try a confession?
“The app shipped on time, because the tests never ran.”
Two words different and now it’s causation. It shipped by skipping the tests, which is a genuinely damning thing to have said out loud.
Let’s get a little fancy:
“The app shipped on time; the tests never ran.”
The semicolon pairs them. Same breath, equal weight, and the inferred opposing tension between them makes the use of the semi-colon self-explanatory.
What if we try something different altogether?
“The app shipped on time (the tests never ran).”
And the parentheses demote. Still true, still there, just filed under things you’re allowed to skip. Obviously, this depends on the context of what came before, but hold on to that train of thought, we’ll get to that.
Now let’s go back to the original:
“The app shipped on time—the tests never ran.”
So which one was it? Contrast? Cause? Was it a throwaway aside, or two halves I was supposed to hold in the same breath?
Four answers were sitting right there, and the em dash picked literally none of them.
I’ll tell you what it did instead: filler bullshit. It added a theatrical “beat”. A beat is fine, I like a good beat. But a beat is not a relationship, it’s just a fricking sound effect.
Now hold your horses, I can already hear the objection, because I’ve heard it before:
“Well, obviously Harsha, there’s the entire context of the paragraph before these statements that you’re not including. Not having that completely changes the context of the em dash, so you’re being disingenuous here.”
Oh? The paragraph before is doing the job of leading up to making the em dash make contextual sense?
Fine.
Then maybe let the paragraph do its damned job?
If the lead-up already told me it was a contrast, it already told me. So what exactly is the flourish at the end adding, other than just one more thing for my eyes to trip over on the way out?
genuine interruption is fine
I can think of a couple of places where the em dash is perfectly suited. I just don’t think most people using one are ever in those situations.
The first is dialogue getting cut off. Not politely either, I mean the snarky back-and-forth where somebody gets four words out before the other person runs them over:
“I was just about to—”
“No, you weren’t.”
The dash isn’t describing an interruption there, it is the interruption. You hear the exact moment the first speaker loses the floor. Try it with anything else and you end up narrating the thing instead of doing it, and now you’re explaining a joke.
The second is a pivot violent enough that you need the reader to feel the sentence break its own neck.
I’m not about to argue that JK Rowling is some kind of em dash mastermind. But there’s a moment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, McGonagall teaching a class with Umbridge parked in the back taking notes, where one line does exactly what I would expect it to do:
“Right then, everyone, listen closely—Dean Thomas, if you do that to the mouse again I shall put you in detention—most of you have now successfully Vanished your snails and even those who were left with a certain amount of shell have got the gist of the spell.”
She’s mid-instruction when she spots Dean doing something to that mouse. 16 words of threat, then she’s back on Vanishing snails without ever finishing the sentence she started.
The book never tells you what he did, and it doesn’t have to. You know it was bad and you know it was fast, because the only evidence you get is how hard she swerved to deal with it. It’s a neck-snapping detail. Dean Thomas and his mouse have nothing to do with Vanishing snails, so it’s not like the dashes are hiding anything. There literally isn’t a single other punctuation mark I can think of that’s more perfect for that job than the em dash.
There’s a third, sort of. In narrative dialogue they can indicate chaotic, breathless, stammering speech, which hints at a character who’s stressed or anxious. Hyphens already do the stutter. The dash is the longer, more pronounced silence.
Apart from cases like those, I genuinely couldn’t tell you when I think they have value.
and then, the machines
Then the LLMs showed up, and this mark that people were already misusing started reaching millions of people who had never actually used them at all.
The origin of it is a little ironic. The “best” writing models (like Claude) get trained predominantly on hyper polished, published, edited prose. Essays, articles, books, basically anything that survived several dozen revisions, editors, and late night arguments before it ever reached a shelf.
But somebody has to decide what counts as “good” data first. A human makes a judgment call about which writing is worth imitating, and then the model learns the frequency of every mark inside it and never once the function.
Nobody sat down and taught it what a dash is supposed to relate. Models don’t know anything, they just measure and rank patterns.
The em dash is the one mark you can deploy without knowing what you’re saying, which makes it perfectly free for something that doesn’t know what it’s saying.
Let me be uncharitable for a second, and just straight up own this as a personal opinion.
I don’t think most people can tell the difference between writing that’s good and writing that’s just decorated with sugar crystals. They see a mark that isn’t on their keyboard, doing a job they couldn’t name if you asked them, and they read it as refinement.
Which is why this godforsaken thing was already winning long before a single model existed. Models picked up on a habit people already had, then industrialized it and started mass-distributing it every day.
Yes, yes. I know. There’s a healthy amount of arrogance in what you’re reading. The em dash predates me by about two centuries, give or take. It was doing its thing before I got here and it’ll be doing it long after.
I still think it’s a crutch. It still feels like you’re just wildly gesticulating at some kind of structure without actually having built any structure. Like literary jazz hands.
Go take the next one out of something you wrote and read the sentence again. Either you find the thought you were avoiding, or you find out there was never a real thought under there to begin with.
At the very least, you should probably know which before you hit publish.