Oh, look! It’s AI writing—you can tell by the em dash, which virtually no humans ever use.
Silly humans.
Em dashes are fantastic. For the first three full decades of my typing, they were the envy of yours truly. I’d see them used in books, where they come in handy if you want to split a sentence again. You’ve already decided you want to clarify something that’s a subset of something else that’s being clarified—another comma won’t do in these types of situations.
What about a semicolon? A sentence like this one practically begs for a semicolon; this isn’t exactly rocket surgery if you know grammar. The commentary after the semicolon stands alone as its own fully formed idea—very different from the em dash.
Seriously, I lusted after the em dash, but I never learned how to type it.
On classic typewriters, where my hunt-and-peck days began, there was no way to make an em dash. Instead, writers would just cobble together two hyphens -- I had to make those in a particular way here on Substack; if you type two hyphens in a row here, you end up with a smooth line—the em dash.
In my electronic keyboarding class (where I officially learned ASDF JKL; typing), we used Smith-Corona machines. No em dashes could be made (besides the rough version of cobbled hyphens), but by the mid 80s, the Macintosh computer had added a dedicated way to make the symbol.
It wasn’t easy: you had to press and hold option and shift, then press the hyphen key. It took PCs a few years to add the feature, and it was very clunky: hold alt while you type 0151, and you’ve been able to make an em dash with this combination since the early 90s. Oh, did I mention that you had to have a numeric keypad, and not all keyboards had these?
Maybe you can tell why I just saw them and kind of moved on in my mind. I didn’t know the arcane secrets, and information was much harder to get back then.
So, maybe it’s no wonder the em dash is so closely associated with AI writing. Up until fairly recently, they’ve been inconvenient enough to discourage me from using them. Over the last decade, there has been an em dash explosion in my writing, and I’m not ashamed of it—you can take the em dashes from my cold, dead Substack writing.
"The Human Em Dash" is not a combination of words I'd have expected to see just a few years ago.
As much as I hate to admit it, nowadays I often find myself deliberately avoiding the em dash in my writing lest I be accused of AI slop, which is somewhat ironic for someone who writes about AI.
My favorite use of the em dash has always been the mid-sentence clarification---sort of like I'm doing here---rather than a pause before the punchline (which is how most AI models seem to use it).
I only started writing when I discovered the em dash and then AI stole it from me. No, I still use it — all the time.