the em dash: a crutch disguised as a flourish

I have a major problem with the em dash. I hate the thing, and I’ve slowly realized I’m much more principled about that hatred than I ever expected to be.

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. I hated this godforsaken punctuation mark long before any model learned how to ~~use~~ abuse it.

But don’t you worry, we’ll get to the AI part…eventually.

An em dash is longer than a hyphen, and your keyboard doesn’t give it a key of its own.

You either have to summon it (Option-Shift-hyphen on a Mac), or, as many people claim, type two hyphens and let an app turn them into one.

A chalk summoning circle on a dark wooden floor, ringed by burnt-down candles, with a single matte black bar sitting in the center and a gray cat watching from just outside the line — Quick, no cheating, do you know how to type an em-dash? Be honest.

Alright, class is in session, let’s begin.

the uninvited guest

A formal dinner table seen from above, with one enormous matte black bar lying across it after shoving 2 place settings aside and knocking over a glass of red wine — Nobody invited it, nobody can make it leave, and it didn’t bring anything.

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 it are being especially honest with themselves about why they’re doing it.

When a dash cuts into a sentence, I can feel whoever wrote it losing control of the thought and reaching for the nearest exit because they never figured out the structure. Maybe they hope nobody notices. I notice every damn time.

I hate how em dashes look, too. To my eye, they make a body of text look ugly as hell, cluttered, choppy, maybe even straight up anxious.

Let me put it this way: commas let things breathe. Periods commit. A colon or semicolon tells you how 2 thoughts relate.

If all you mean is “these things are broadly near each other”, you’ve got commas, parentheses, colons, semicolons, even a freaking ellipsis. Picking one is, to me, commitment.

But an em dash? Like a bull in a china shop it just barges in, demanding attention it hasn’t earned. And it never gives you a reason for being 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 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 you’re back in the sentence, and you’re supposed to act like nothing happened.

Want to know what it feels like for me to read that? Here.

Two of them, one on each side, and then nothing. Nobody says a word.

“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. Nothing had to disappear, and nothing got lost except the 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 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 tells you the next word is the answer. No drumroll needed. 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 I’d bet money you’ve seen before.

“The app shipped on time—the tests never ran.”

And? What exactly am I supposed to do with that?

Let’s make the contrast explicit.

“The app shipped on time, but the tests never ran.”

The comma plus a but flat out contradicts. The second half undercuts the first, and now you know how the 2 facts relate. No guessing. Beautiful.

Why don’t we try a confession?

“The app shipped on time because the tests never ran.”

Swap in because 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. You have to infer the tension yourself.

What if the second fact is only an aside?

“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.

A workshop bench where four machined steel punctuation marks are each mid-task: a comma bracing two wooden blocks, parentheses cradling a speckled egg, a period capping a stack of discs, a semicolon balancing two weights on a fulcrum. In the open middle of the bench one matte black bar lies flat in a scatter of sawdust, doing nothing — Four of them are doing something. One of them is present.

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: filler bullshit. It added a theatrical “beat”. I like a good beat, but a beat doesn’t tell you how the 2 facts relate. 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 what makes the em dash understandable?

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 is the flourish adding except one more thing for my eyes to trip over?

when the interruption is the point

I can think of a few places where the em dash is perfectly suited. I just don’t see most em dashes being used in any of them.

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 J.K. Rowling is some kind of em dash mastermind. But there’s a moment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where Rowling uses one exactly as I would. McGonagall is teaching a class, with Umbridge parked in the back taking notes.

“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, and then she’s back on Vanishing snails in the same breath.

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. I can’t think of another punctuation mark that could do that job.

There’s a third, sort of. In dialogue, an em dash can show a voice being cut off or changing course mid-sentence. Hyphens handle a stutter, and an ellipsis handles speech trailing away.

Apart from cases like those, I haven’t seen a use where I prefer the em dash to another mark.

and then, the machines

Then the LLMs showed up, and a mark people were already misusing began showing up everywhere.

The origin is a little ironic. Models learned the pattern from writing that already used it. They can copy where the mark appears without ever explaining what the 2 halves are doing.

The em dash lets you join 2 thoughts without naming the relationship, which makes it perfect for prose that only needs to sound finished.

I think a lot of people read decoration as refinement. They see a mark that isn’t on their keyboard, doing a job they couldn’t name if you asked them, and assume it must be sophisticated.

Models found the habit in our writing and started putting it everywhere.

Yes, yes. I know. This is arrogant. The em dash predates me by about 2 centuries. None of that makes me like it.

An excavation trench in dry pale earth shot from above, with one matte black bar half-buried in the lowest layer, brushed clean and completely undamaged, beside an archaeologist’s brush, a folding ruler and a numbered marker peg — This accursed thing has been around for way longer than I have.

I still think it’s a crutch. It feels like you’re wildly gesticulating at a structure you never built. Literary jazz hands.

Both arms out. Nothing behind them.

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.