Busting the myth that ’em-dashes’ are a sure sign of an AI text

Defending our em-dashes as the way we humans honestly express ourselves

This column is one I hoped I would not have to write, but obviously more journalists, educators and editors need to defend our beloved em-dashes against the malignant suspicion that, by using them, we may be mistaken for AI bots.

So, why am I writing this now?

Well, I was not pleased to see that the noted journalist and critic Nitsuh Abebe raised the AI-em-dash myth again this week in the widely read pages of The New York Times. I thought we had put that myth to rest months ago. I thought it was officially dead when famed Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty appeared both in her Apple podcast and in the pages of such prestigious papers as The Los Angeles Times debunking the myth. By writing about this again in The New York Times, this week, Abebe actually heightened online awareness of the myth.

So, let’s all pitch in and bust this myth. Share a link to this column with someone you know who is in charge of writers in some way—perhaps educators, editors, parents, community leaders, office managers.

Where did the myth originate?

We don’t know exactly. This week, I’ve read more than a dozen articles from the past few months and no one seems to have found a smoking gun. Apparently, the myth that em-dashes are a “tell” that AI wrote a text sprang up early this year because of popular podcasts that discussed the proper usage of em-dashes and mentioned that AI now reproduces em-dashes in the texts it provides. The fact that people were noticing em-dashes in AI texts morphed into: “If you see an em-dash, or multiple em-dashes, then AI probably wrote the text.”

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Em-dashes have many uses, chiefly because they express the way we actually talk to each other. Any journalist who has ever looked for quotes to use in writing an article for publication by re-reading a full transcription of a recorded interview knows that em-dashes are the way humans speak. In technical terms, I’m describing the interruptive use of an em-dash to show, perhaps, that one person’s words were cut off by another person’s voice.

“I was about to—”

“What were you about to do?”

“If you’ll let me finish, please, I was was about to explain why em-dashes are so vital in accurately capturing contemporary narration.”

That exchange was an example of one person interrupting another, making an em-dash handy to show how the first person’s voice was cut off abruptly.

But then, people also interrupt themselves frequently.

“Please, let me explain this: I was about to say that this longest form in the hyphen family, which dates to the 1700s—and is so-called because typesetters knew it was the width of the letter M—and was used in classics like Tristram Shandy, was even favored by Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence. Did you know that? It’s true, but don’t immediately check an online text of the Declaration, because multiple editors, as far back as 1776, tried to ‘clean up’ Jefferson’s long horizontal sweeps of his quill pen, aka em-dashes. I’m explaining all of this, because it’s worth pointing out that em-dashes are a long-standing part of American literary arts. Heck, they’re downright patriotic.”

See? I just used a colon, commas with a “which” clause, plus em-dashes within that clause to highlight a parenthetical remark in a spoken form. I even used quotes to denote that I’m intending that phrase “clean up” as a rebuke of that excuse from editors who removed Jefferson’s em-dashes.

Why didn’t I use parentheses, in my example, instead of em-dashes? Because humans don’t speak aloud with “parentheses”—although they sometimes do like to speak with an air-quote gesture, which isn’t the subject of this column, of course. Have you ever heard someone say the words “parenthesis” and “close parenthesis” while talking? And there’s no air-parenthesis gesture I’ve ever seen. Thank heavens! No, we simply pause for emphasis when we’re speaking, and that’s why em-dashes are so valuably accurate to signal those pauses and interruptions.

Jefferson liked them because he thought they could “mark breaks for emphatic pauses”—in other words, dramatically expressing the way he would have read the text aloud.

The basic reason that the em-dash is not an AI invention is that this myth flies in the face of the logic of AI, which was trained on millions and millions of texts written by real people.

Real people love and use pauses and self-interruptions every day. Veteran editors and writers, including those of us at Front Edge Publishing and ReadTheSpirit magazine, like our em-dashes—thank you very much! We use them on a weekly basis.

And, yes, we are humans—real humans.

In fact, the same week I am posting this column, We also are publishing a long interview with American novelist Kent Nerburn about his newest and perhaps greatest novel, Lone Dog Road. One distinctive feature of this new novel is that Kent chose not to appear in this novel as a narrator, as he has in previous novels. Instead, he worked painstakingly to let various characters narrate their own sections of this novel in their own first-person voices. 

In that interview in ReadTheSpirit, Kent says: “I decided to risk taking myself out of the novel altogether—to remove the role of narrator in the book—and to try to let the people in this story tell their own stories. I wanted readers to read and hear and feel the rhythms, the cadences, the spaces in their way of telling their own stories.”

And real people speak with the “spaces” and interruptions and digressions that Kent is describing. Real people speak with em-dashes embedded in their parlance.

So, don’t even try to remove this tool from our writing, editing and publishing toolbox by maligning it as an “AI tell” in any advice you might be preparing for writers and editors. Please, don’t ban em-dashes in your internal style-books and writing guides.

And for those of you who know Tristram Shandy, you’ll also recognize that this column itself is a bit of a humble homage to the great Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768), who still makes many of us smile to this day with the art of self-interruption.

And, did you catch that last typographical example? Sometimes, parentheses are, indeed, valuable tools—and so is that nice little hyphen—two kinds of symbols I just used in combination to convey the span of Sterne’s remarkable life.

So, please, don’t touch our literary toolboxes and you may find that you’ll continue to have fun with great novelists like Kent Nerburn. (And I can affirm that Kent Nerburn is a real human. As I explain in the interview with him, I’ve actually stayed in his home and traveled with him.)