I’m so mad that em-dashes are getting treated as a sure tell for “AI writing”—like, I have loved em-dashes since FOREVER. They’re expressive! They’re dramatic! They let a sentence breathe and spiral and then snap back together! You will find em-dashes scattered throughout fanfics I wrote over a decade ago, back when the only thing judging my prose was a sleep-deprived reader on a dying laptop.
And now every time my fingers hover over that beautiful little punctuation mark, I get this gut-crunching anxiety like, oh no, are people going to think I outsourced my personality to a robot? Do I need to stop using the punctuation that best matches the way my brain actually works because ai think bots decided they, too, like em-dashes???
Anyway I will be continuing to use em-dashes—loudly, lovingly, and on purpose—exactly the way I always have. I’m not changing how I write just because people decided em-dashes mean something else now—they’ve been here the whole time.
