Has AI ruined the em dash?

Summada AI bots must’ve been trained on content written from your humble daily-ish narrator it seems. One of my favorite literary devices, my beloved em dash—that thing, not to be confused with the en dash–which is that one, nor the hyphen-which is that one. 

This is my WORST nightmare!

Nothing feels better than adding an em dash—especially between a natural break in the sentence—that keeps the reader fishing for the next word. I’m of the belief that em dashes are better for flow, and thus, readership than commas, semicolons (which I admittedly never use because despite writing for a living, I’m not entirely sure the best context to use semicolons), parentheses, and hyphens. 

Of course, it’s not lost on me that the paragraph above uses many of the literary devices it explains. The best way to use literary devices is to switch it up to keep your readers on their toes. Plus, there are some sentences that would look dumb with double parentheses. In fact, I’ve written many-a sentences where I originally wanted parentheses, but then another use for parentheses came up and I had to replace the original with em dashes so my sentence didn't look like a jumbled mess of a thing. 

Anyway, that’s a lotta buildup without saying the point of this email yet: 

Apparently, an “AI tell” is the use of em dashes. AI supposedly uses more em dashes than most humans do—my guess is because most humans don’t know the keyboard command to even make an em dash, but to help humanity take back the em dash from our AI overlords, I’ll tell you (well, only if you have a Mac…): 

Shift, Option, and the Hyphen button create this wonderful literary device—

Ahhhhh, it just feels so good to use. 

That said, I’m gonna try to use less of it. 

Why?

Well, a key to persuasion is to not engage in anti-persuasion. And if an audience is familiar with the idea that the em dash is an AI tell, then, well, it’s best to use it less often. 

You want your copy to read like a window so clean that birds collide right into it because they think it’s just innocent air. The more your copy looks like copy, the less persuasive it’ll be. People don’t like being marketed or sold to. But they like buying. And copy ought to allow them to buy without feeling like we’re being sold or marketed to. 

Humans are weird aren’t they? 

But the trouble is, certain audiences will sniff out an em dash, perceive it as they’re being sold or marketed to (and even worse, but a damnable robot that’s gonna end the world by 2029 if’n you believe the warnings James Cameron alluded to in The Terminator!). 

Now, I’m still not totally opposed to an em dash. 

For many of my clients and my own personal writing, my writing is littered with em dashes. And I don’t suspect most people are thinking I’m using a robot to write. 

But it’s something I’m going to be (slightly) more aware of. 

Which sucks. 

So, RIP to the em dash. 

It’s been my favorite literary device since I learned the command which produces it. 

Anywho: 

If you’d like to join me in the battle for the em dash, hit reply. 

If we’re a good fit, we’ll make so much moolah together that maybe, just maybe, we can dismantle AI before it taketh over… 

John