sure. wait. what?

I judge people who judge other people for using the em dash, especially when they do so with higher-than-thou pomp as if they deserve a trophy for being smarter than everyone else because, unlike the normies, they can see through a bot-generated facade.

But to them I say: Dear, you are not smart. You just have Internet access.

Resorting to heuristics — in this case, assuming that the em dash is an automatic tell of AI writing — is a better indicator of intellectual snoozing than a tiny punctuation mark. Yes, generic AI slop suffers from Em Dash Overdose, but to throw a massive blanket over all texts with an em dash and to suffocate them with your ostensibly superior AI-detection radar is giving medyo kinda bobo.

Just kidding. It’s giving sobrang bobo.

I get that for some people it boils down to preference. Of course you’re allowed to dislike a punctuation mark the same way Kurt Vonnegut blasted semicolons in an essay in A Man Without a Country. (I don’t agree; I like semicolons.)

But if you’re an educator who gives your students a failing mark as soon as you see an em dash on their paper, you need to step up and be better at your job. How about reading books instead of scrolling on TikTok? Have you read Emily Dickinson’s poems and noticed how she punctuates the verses? Do you even attempt to do the mental heavy lifting when reviewing your students’ work instead of relying on AI-detection software?

I understand that teaching can be challenging especially at a time when students have access to sophisticated computing, but at least acknowledge that the intersections between AI and literature are far more complex than an innocent, unassuming dash. I think we all should.

We clock overreliance on AI not by probing the punctuation in a text, but by reading through the content and the insights posed by the text. This may not be easy, especially if you yourself outsource your critical thinking to a generative AI chatbot — but how difficult is it, really, to recognize that the presence of an em dash or two or five in whatever you’re reading does not automatically signify tech-assisted inauthenticity?

This entire em dash hate parade makes me feel thankful I do not write for a living. If I did, I would be annoyed every time I had to rewrite my sentences just to avoid using an em dash, a punctuation that I find as reliable as it is versatile.

And it’s not just me, mind you. Many folks over at Substack are going up in arms against the em dash police, which, I notice, is comprised mostly of young people with limited exposure to literature (likely the same people who find Sally Rooney “hard to read,” another punctuation-related vitriol that confounds me).

Anyway, my opinion on the em dash does not matter in the grand scheme of things. I’m not going to make it my personality to defend a punctuation mark like a passionate Oxford Comma Advocate — people are free to read however they want and dismiss the em dash however they please. There’s a bigger story here about the growing cultural unease against AI at a time when economic and political anxieties are just as crippling, so I better rest my case. These em dash haters probably think I’m the one with shit for brains anyway.