The em dash did nothing wrong
Somewhere in 2024 the em dash became a suspect. People started screenshotting LinkedIn posts and circling the dashes like crime scene evidence. I write for a living and I’m about to defend a punctuation mark in public, which tells you a lot about how my year is going.
The em dash did nothing wrong. AI just used it the way a teenager uses cologne.
I maintain a framework for stripping machine patterns out of copy. The current version runs five passes and catalogs more than a hundred tells. Almost none of them are punctuation. The dash, the word “delve,” the rule-of-three sentence: surface symptoms, all of them. The disease sits underneath, in what the writing is trying to do. AI writing wants you satisfied. It resolves every tension it raises and hedges anywhere a position would cost something. Human writing has an axe to grind. You can strip every dash out of a draft and a sharp editor will still smell the machine, because the draft still wants to be liked.
So when an agency sends me an AI-assisted draft, I don’t start with punctuation. I start by asking what the piece is arguing and what the author risks by arguing it. Usually the answer is nothing, and that’s the actual problem. We fix that first. The vocabulary cleanup is the easy part at the end.
Two things worth doing to whatever you’re shipping this week. One, stop hunting dashes and start hunting hedges. Count the sentences in your draft a reader could disagree with. If the answer is zero, no thesaurus will save you. Two, read the closing paragraph. AI drafts end with a little inspirational shrug about the future. Cut it and end where the point lands.
The dash deserves an apology.