Apparently we’ve reached the stage of internet literacy where seeing an em dash in prose is now considered forensic proof of AI.
Genuine question. Do you guys know grammar. Like. At all.
I’m asking as a non-native speaker because I honestly don’t know what the baseline is in English-speaking countries anymore.
I started learning English when I was three. Yes, three. My parents found the only kindergarten in our entire district that had English on the schedule in the 90s in a post-communist country and tossed me in there. I’m pretty sure the teacher herself was operating on vibes and a phrasebook, but it was enough for my child brain to latch onto the language like a white tablecloth latching onto pinot noir.
(Literally nothing better at three than learning that pies is dog and kot is cat.)
And I loved it. Capital L loved it in the way other kids love dinosaurs or Peppa Pig. I was obsessed with words. With structure. With how sentences could work.
I literally prefer English to Polish so much that I sometimes have to use the translator to find words in Polish when I write a fuckin’ work email. My brain is half this half that when offline. I am just glad my hubs is the same, because he doesn’t double take when my sentences end up bilingual.
I learned half of my vocabulary reading Harry Potter pornfic on FF.net (yes, do the math). This was before the second-to-last instalment even came out. Insane. But I wasn’t there for the porn. I genuinely could not have cared less about what was going on in those scenes. I was there for the new words. The sentence structures. The pauses that conveyed emotion. The ellipses. The broken words. The punctuation I didn’t fully understand yet. The grammar that made my head spin in the best possible way.
I’ll never forget my British Council teacher asking us to list sentence connectors in class, and me saying “albeit” because I’d just encountered it the previous day. “Did you just say ‘albeit’,” asked the freckled, ginger-haired, ginger-bearded man—the epitome of Ireland, except from Tennessee.
I took notes on the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes when I was fifteen. I made flashcards for punctuation rules. Entire lessons of literature classes were spent discussing when to use a colon, when a semicolon actually strengthens a sentence, when a dash introduces interruption versus expansion.
And now I’m on the precipice of thirty-six, being told that using an em dash makes my writing look like ChatGPT.
Also, as implied before, I am Polish. The em dash as it’s used rhetorically inside English prose doesn’t really exist in Polish writing in the same way. Our punctuation rules are entirely different, to the point that we format dialogue differently, using what looks like an em dash at the start of a line to indicate that a character is speaking.
So yeah, my use of the em dash is entirely learned. Taught as a stylistic tool in English prose by English literature enthusiasts.
Foreign speakers often have to learn these conventions consciously.
And now apparently using them correctly is suspicious.
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