Em dashes are the new Comic Sans

There is a single punctuation mark that now screams “a machine wrote this,” and I bet you can guess which one. The em dash. It used to be a writer’s flourish, a confident little hinge between two halves of a thought. Now it’s a tell, the typographic equivalent of Comic Sans on a wedding invitation, and the moment I see three of them in a paragraph I stop reading the argument and start reading the tool that produced it.

I’m not being precious about grammar. I love the em dash on its own merits. The problem isn’t the mark, it’s what the mark has come to signal. Every chatbot reaches for it by default, several times a sentence, because it’s a tidy way to attach a clause without committing to whether it’s a parenthetical or a list or a pause. So the dash got mass-produced. And anything mass-produced by the same machine, in the same rhythm, starts to read like a watermark.

A signal, not a sin

Here’s the part people miss when they roll their eyes at this. The em dash isn’t bad writing. It’s a statistical fingerprint. The default output of every model has a recognizable cadence, and the dash is the easiest piece of that cadence to spot from across the room.

Think about what that does to a reader who’s seen a thousand generated paragraphs this month. They’ve trained a little classifier in their head, and it fires on the dash before they’ve consciously read a word. Once it fires, your credibility leaks. They start scanning for the other tells: the “it’s not just X, it’s Y” construction, the suspiciously balanced three-item list, the closing paragraph that restates the opening in a bow. The dash is the thread, and once they pull it the whole thing unravels into “oh, this is just un-edited model output.”

The em dash didn’t get worse. The world around it changed, and a mark that used to read as craft now reads as a default nobody bothered to override.

The sweep, and why it’s worth it

So I do a small, slightly obsessive ritual. Before anything I’ve written goes anywhere public, I sweep every em dash out of it. Not with a find-and-replace that swaps one character for another. That’s how you get a document full of commas where colons belong, which is its own kind of tell. I replace each one in context, reading the actual sentence and asking what it’s doing.

• A pause for emphasis becomes a colon, because a colon promises the reader that what’s coming next pays off the setup.
• A parenthetical aside goes in actual parentheses, or gets pulled out into its own short sentence if it earned the room.
• Two clauses I jammed together become two sentences, which usually reads better anyway because the dash was hiding a thought I hadn’t finished.

That last one is the quiet payoff. Half the time the dash wasn’t a style choice, it was a place where I’d stapled two ideas together to avoid deciding how they relate. Removing it forces the decision, and the writing gets sharper, not just less suspicious.

It’s really about ownership

The dash is the obvious example, but the principle is bigger than punctuation. In an age where every tool ships with a default voice, your job is to override the defaults until what’s left sounds like you and only you. Strip the tells. Break the cadence the model loves. Be a little uneven, a little human, in the places the machine is smoothly the same.

None of this means avoiding the tools. I use them constantly. It means treating their output as a first draft in someone else’s handwriting, and not letting it go out the door wearing my name until I’ve made it mine. The em dash is just the first thing I reach for, because it’s the cheapest, most visible tell to remove and the one that buys back the most trust per keystroke.

So no, I won’t be taking the dash back when this blows over. The mark is fine. The signal is the point. And right now the signal says: nobody was driving.