Em Dash—An ASCII Assault.

Look, I’m no writer—I suck at spelling, and I’m generally too lazy to write much. But I do enjoy good typography and try to use proper punctuation where I can.

Over the past year or so, we’ve been thrown into a world dominated by AI and LLMs. I’m not going to pretend I don’t use them—I do—but I try to do so sparingly and thoughtfully. There are obviously massive issues with AI, but I’m not here to talk about those problems. I want to talk about how Chatty G^* has ruined em dashes.

It’s become such a thing that people are deliberately removing em dashes from their writing just so it doesn’t look like it was generated by AI. Yeah, not ideal—but this is the world we live in now. They’re even coming for our beautiful em dashes.

All of this is to say: I will continue to use em dashes, and I want you to know—this post was written by me, not AI.

* Someone referred to Chat GPT as Chatty G... and it stuck.