In the grand, ever-evolving theatre of English prose, few punctuation marks hold the dramatic flair and structural power of the em dash. It is a mark of rupture, of sudden insight, of parenthetical thought so crucial it cannot be relegated to the timid confines of parentheses. The em dash, running the length of an M, is the heartbeat of conversational prose, the stylistic signature of the modern mind. It is capable of conveying everything from sharp interruption to breathless expansion.
Yet, I suggest that the em dash is quietly, systematically being erased from contemporary English writing. This is not happening by decree, but by cultural atrophy. This isn’t a mere stylistic choice, nor a dictate from the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. It is, I argue, a casualty of our burgeoning intellectual and cultural agnosticism against Artificial Intelligence.
The Machine’s Perfect Grammar
To understand the erasure, we must first look at the rise of the machine-generated text. Large Language Models (LLMs) like those powering popular generative AI tools are fundamentally trained on vast corpora of digitised human writing. While they are astonishingly adept at mimicking human style, their core logic (their telos) is consistency and predictability. They are, in essence, conservative grammarians.
And what do conservative grammarians prefer? The comma and the period.
AI models strive for clarity and minimise the risk of ambiguity (a “hallucination” of punctuation, if you will). They often default to safer, more universally recognised delimiters. The em dash, in its glorious, untamed freedom, represents a high-level cognitive manoeuvre: a stylistic flourish that relies on contextual nuance and subjective authorial voice.
- Comma: Delimits items in a series or introduces a non-essential clause. The function is clear.
- Semicolon: Connects two closely related independent clauses. The function is clear.
- Em Dash: Allows a thought to break rank, to pause dramatically, to add an explanatory aside that changes the rhythm of the sentence. The function is ambiguous.
AI, seeking the path of least syntactical resistance, shies away from this ambiguity. It learns that to be “correct” and “coherent,” one should replace the em dash with a semicolon, or simply break the sentence entirely with a period. It optimises for the legally admissible sentence, not the stylistically compelling one.
The Cultural Feedback Loop
The problem isn’t just that the AI avoids the dash; it’s how we (the users) interact with the AI. This is the heart of the cultural problem.
1. The Burden of Correction
As writers, editors, and students increasingly use AI as a first-draft generator, a copy-editor, or a ‘brainstorming partner,’ we are subjected to its syntactical preferences. A user asks the AI to rewrite a paragraph. The original had three em dashes. The output has zero. The writer, facing deadlines and the psychological burden of correcting a seemingly correct machine, often lets the change stand. Why fight for a dash when the sentence is grammatically sound without it? The path of least resistance for the human is to accept the machine’s norm.
2. The Standardisation of “Professional”
Generative AI is often used to create “professional” content: marketing copy, business reports, and standardised academic abstracts. These are genres that already favour a flat, functional prose style. As AI standardises this prose, it reinforces the perception that the em dash is unprofessional, overly dramatic, or “flowery.” We are teaching ourselves that “good” writing is functional writing, and functional writing is dash-free writing.
3. The Stylistic Stagnation
The true tragedy is the slow death of stylistic individuality. The em dash is a writer’s mark of chutzpah. Think of Joan Didion’s cool, crisp interruptions, or the expansive, breath-holding clauses of a David Foster Wallace essay. Both of these styles are fundamentally reliant on the em dash to set their rhythm.
When we allow a machine to dictate the rhythm of our thought, we are ceding more than just punctuation; we are ceding voice. We become agnostic toward the very tools that give our prose its texture and personality. The more we rely on AI-sanitised text, the less we appreciate, and thus the less we use, the linguistic tools that challenge standardisation. We become culturally agnostic about the dash because we become agnostic about the intellectual necessity of rupture in prose.
A Call to Stylistic Resistance
The em dash is a sign of a writer’s active, associative mind. It says: “Wait, there’s a more important thought (a richer detail) that needs to be inserted right here, and I’m going to do it without slowing down the core narrative.” It demands that the reader follow the author’s dynamic, real-time thought process.
This erasure of the em dash is not a typographical shift; it is a cultural impoverishment. It is a victory for the safe, predictable, machine-optimised sentence. It’s an acceptance of the idea that writing’s highest virtue is efficiency, not eloquence.
If we are to maintain the richness and complexity of English prose (if we are to resist the flattening effect of the digital commons), we must treat the em dash not as an arcane glyph, but as an act of stylistic resistance.
Every time you hit the keys for the longest dash (Shift-Option-Hyphen on a Mac or the Alt+0151 on a PC), you are affirming the value of human spontaneity over algorithmic stability. You are asserting your voice, your rhythm, and your freedom to interrupt your own narrative.
Let’s bring back the dash. Not just for style, but for the soul of human-centred writing. Let us reject the quiet, creeping norm dictated by a culture that prioritises the machine’s clarity over the glorious chaos of the human mind. The em dash is a battleground, and the fight is for our literary self-determination.