The em dash does not belong to ChatGPT
A writer-journalist friend was recently told that something he wrote felt like it was ChatGPT-coded. This was because of his liberal use of the em dash—that long punctuation mark which signals a mid-sentence shift to add emphasis, or to frame a detail too important to sideline.
Over the last few months, there has been a lot of clamour around em dashes showing up frequently in AI-generated writing. The assumption, now gathering steam in certain corners of the internet, is that if you use too many em dashes in your social media posts, you must be using AI to aid your writing.
Furious at the allegation, my friend took to LinkedIn to post a spirited rant—part grammar lesson, part love letter—breaking down the em dash, the en dash, and the humble hyphen.
It got me thinking. As a reader, when I see a detail framed by em dashes, I take it more seriously than if it were cushioned inside parentheses. In my head, parentheses whisper and giggle, but em dashes declare. Even if a thought comes engulfed in parentheses inside my head, when I put it on paper, I often use em dashes instead, because I want the reader to think they still carry the same weight as the stuff that came before and after.
Incidentally, Jane Austen, the subject of our cover this week, was famously em-dash-happy. In 2019, writer Kressie Kornis published findings from a two-year study of dashes in Austen's manuscripts and published work, which excluded hyphens and dashes used in place of proper nouns. Some of her drafts, Kornis noted, used up to 67% more dashes than her published works. This also suggests that Austen's editors may have deliberately dumbed down her writing style. Even more fascinating: Austen's dash usage increased with age.
On Instagram, I stumbled upon handles like @emdashphilips of American poet Emilia Philips, and a private account @emdashes belonging to an Emily Gordon who mentions punctuation in her bio. It was delightful to see people are building their online identities around this punctuation mark. And why shouldn't they? The em dash is serious business.
Translator and academician Arunava Sinha says, 'As a reader, an em dash tells me to stop, think, and then move on. I like reading in a rush, so I appreciate it when a writer asks me to pause.' Even though he's partial to commas when he writes, he admits they make every portion of a sentence look identical. The em dash, however, 'allows for emphasis'.
Author Nona Uppal from Delhi has long memorised 'Option+Shift+ Hyphen' command on her Macbook to summon the em dash. 'I've been doing it for years,' she says. 'I think I should just create a shortcut key instead,' she says, almost as if sandwiching the thought between em dashes as she speaks. 'But I like that there's some friction in the process of placing an em dash,' she reckons almost immediately after. 'I don't want to overuse it. The em dash should capture an inner layer of thought that I want the reader to pay attention to,' Uppal says.
While there are many writers speaking up in defence of the em dash ever since the AI link-up, I do wonder if this will make the silent majority of those not too confident about their place as writers pipe down on their genuine em-dashing.
'Interestingly, if they do, the frequency of em dashes in AI-writing will reduce too,' says Avinash Pandey, a faculty member in the linguistics department at the University of Mumbai. 'After all, AI simply regurgitates what has been fed to it.'
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