Dash It All – AI, Em Dashes and Copywriting
I know we’re all tired of hearing about how the em dash is a tell of AI writing. I’ve had murky feelings about this from the start of the ~discourse~, but something happened recently that’s made me dig up this particular dead horse to give it a kick of my own. Last week, before presenting my copy to a client, a well-meaning account manager confidently removed every one of my em dashes. The presence of em dashes apparently made this person suspect my work was AI-generated, believe my readers might think so, or possibly both.
It was a pain because I had added those rejected em dashes to my copy more deliberately than usual. I’d taken over the work from a previous copywriter who had followed AP style – the only major guide I know that advocates for spaced em dashes. It’s not a style I use (nor does most AI), my preference being for a spaced en dash, or, at a stretch, an unspaced em dash. But taking over another writer’s work requires diplomatic punctuation, and so, for the sake of consistency, I continued their style. Far from being the thoughtless artefacts of some machine’s stylistic algorithm, I had painstakingly spaced every single one of the foul things in pursuit of brand continuity.
In my work, I’m used to defending my word choices and grammar. Occasionally, I’ll find myself going into battle against people who are neither writers nor editors but who have Big Feelings about the grammar ‘rules’ they learned in school. I’ve lost count of how many times someone – often with very good intentions – has introduced errors while attempting to ‘fix’ a perceived problem. An overly confident intern once ‘improved’ my work by inadvertently adding a slur (!?). In that context, the quiet removal of a few em dashes feels fairly benign. But in this instance, the account manager hadn’t removed those dashes because they thought the marks were wrong – it was because they felt they weren’t mine. It was the first time I’ve found myself needing to defend my punctuation.
Why has this particular mark become suspect? Why not the rule of thirds or rhetorical questions, which AI also uses constantly? And how do we, as copywriters, respond to the phenomenon?
A quick note: I’ll occasionally refer to people here as ‘writers’ and ‘non-writers’. We are all writers to some degree, and I certainly don’t mean it as a snub. It’s just a convenient (if imprecise) way of distinguishing between those who spend their days professionally or recreationally fussing over punctuation and those with other interests.
Onward ho!
Understanding dashes
People who have just discovered dashes talk about them as though they arrived recently and uninvited. Supposedly, no one uses them, no one understands them, and no one knows where to find them on a keyboard. This isn’t true, nor has it ever been, and to disprove it yourself, go pick up a book. Open at random: there they are. Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie uses nine of them across two pages. They’re everywhere, and they’ve been there for hundreds of years.
-
Hyphen
–
En dash
—
Em dash
But are those the long dashes – the ones people are calling the ChatGPT hyphen? No, most of the dashes I encountered while conducting this experiment myself were not em dashes. They were en dashes. And while the two look deceptively similar, they each have their own particular role (though not everyone agrees on exactly what those roles should be). And despite em dashes being referred to as the ‘ChatGPT hyphen’, neither are hyphens. Confused? Understandable. Here’s a quick overview to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Hyphens (-)
The hyphen is the shortest of the three dashes used in modern English and, arguably, the best understood – though that’s not to say it’s always used correctly. These are used for joining compound words (like ‘well-read’ or ‘far-flung’) and linking the head and body of words decapitated by line breaks.
En dashes (–)
The en dash, the width of a capital N, is longer than a hyphen, shorter than an em dash and serves three primary functions. First, it acts as a typographical ‘to’ in spans of time, numbers or distance (like 1990–2025 or 15–20 cm). Second, in certain style guides, it functions as a ‘super-hyphen’, linking complex terms and compound phrases where a hyphen would be confusing (for example, post–World War II fashion). Tbh, this rule has always baffled me, and I only use it in the hopes that one day someone will email me with congratulations for committing to the bit. Third, and most importantly for this discussion, in most British and Australian English style guides, the spaced en dash (an en dash with spaces on each side) is used to signal breaks in thought, additions or interruptions – precisely where American writers would reach for the unspaced (no gaps between the dash and the words) em dash. The dashes you see in my writing are en dashes.
Em dashes (—)
The em dash, the width of a capital M, does the same structural heavy lifting as the spaced en dash. American English and many British and Australian media publications prefer the unspaced em dash to the spaced en dash. Neither is more correct than the other. The em dash does, however, have a secondary use worth noting. It can be employed to signal interruptions in dialogue, such as a character being cut off mid-sentence, for example: ‘Wait! The jewels are in the—’. This, too, is a matter of convention rather than a rule, but the unspaced em dash lends itself well to abrupt endings, acting like a visual stop sign to the word it follows.
If that has left you reeling, take courage. Dashes, colons, semicolons, and ellipses have long shared the dubious honour of being the most mistrusted marks in English. All three serve a syntactic (sentence-structural) role in connecting parts of sentences, shifting direction or deliberately trailing off. The immense possibilities they offer can feel scary, with too much potential for unwanted ambiguity, which makes some people nervous. For non-writers, these marks frequently come with a fear of ‘using them wrong’. Style guides, which supposedly offer guidance, are less than useless when it comes to concrete answers for the average non-writer. Their advice contradicts from guide to guide, and what is correct in one house style is incorrect in another. The result is that many people avoid these marks entirely, which is a shame.
But AI doesn’t avoid em dashes. On the contrary, the abandon with which it slathers them throughout its writing is startling – and has led to all this the suspicion surrounding the em dash and AI writing.
AI and the em dash
The relationship between non-writers and punctuation has changed. When people write their own emails, messages, essays, etc., they tend to follow their own orthography – their personal habits of spelling and punctuation – without much conscious thought. But when they use AI, their words come back to them with unexpected additions. Punctuation appears where they wouldn’t normally use it. Marks they’ve never chosen for themselves, like the em dash, are suddenly part of their ‘voice’.
I really think this is the key to understanding the anti-dash bias. When people use AI, they see it as producing their own writing, or what’s intended to sound like it (a polished, tidier version of themselves). And when punctuation appears in that context, it stands out far more than it would in a novel or an online article, where you’re reading someone else’s words. People notice it because it wasn’t part of their personal style before, and now it is. Because AI introduced it, they associate it with AI. The em dash, which has been in frequent use since at least the 1600s, is now considered an AI tell.
“When people use AI, they see it as producing their own writing. And when punctuation appears in that context, it stands out far more than it would in a novel or a newspaper article, where you’re reading someone else’s words. ”
People can’t retroactively notice something. The em dashes that have surrounded them their entire lives, in books, magazines and websites, didn’t register. They didn’t notice them, so they can’t go back and see them. What they do notice are the em dashes that appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the AI-generated copy they asked to sound like themselves. And so, from that moment onwards, every em dash they encounter feels suspect.
AI absolutely uses em dashes more frequently than most human writers. This is likely a result of its training data, which was stolen from a wide range of sources, including works of literature, manuals and editorials. But it could also be due to something more structural, which tells us about the inherent vacuity of AI outputs: dashes are unusually neutral marks. Unlike commas, colons or semicolons, which each hold quite specific meanings when connecting clauses, the dash lets a writer join clauses without committing to how those clauses relate to each other. This is ideal for AI, which prioritises the appearance of intelligence over actual novel or robust thought, which it is incapable of. Dashes may offer the appearance of structure without the burden of actual meaning.
What’s a copywriter to do?
At the heart of this, I think, are two types of people.
The first is the non-writer. These are people who have never given punctuation much thought. They had, until recently, no strong opinions about dashes at all, and why on earth should they? Then AI came along, and because AI-generated writing is seen as a tidier version of the reader’s own voice, the changes it introduces feel weirdly intimate. The em dash appears in the AI-generated text they believed was ‘themselves’, and they assume it must belong to AI. Totally fair, but incorrect.
The second is the copywriter. This group (hopefully) notices punctuation with great interest. Copywriters have learned to treat the dash as a reliable tool for creating a conversational tone more effectively than commas, semicolons or ellipses. And now, with AI scattering dashes like rice at an Etta James wedding, many copywriters feel as though their tool is being taken from them, or worse, corrupted.
So, what do we do? It feels like a bit of an impasse, and I don’t have the answer. My instinct is to respond as I did to the account manager who deleted all of mine: dashes are perfectly sound punctuation marks, and removing them from our toolbox is a concession to what will, I believe, end up being a short-term public bias. No modern punctuation mark has escaped historical disapproval (in 1850, The Common School Journal advised that scholars should avoid colons, and that ‘we should not let children use them’). The difference here is that the conversation has breached containment. The non-writing public is now discussing punctuation – this should be a good thing!
“Dashes are perfectly sound punctuation marks, and removing them from our toolbox is a concession to what will, in my view, end up being a short-term public bias.”
Where I hesitate is in focusing on what copywriting actually is. Novels, poetry and even editorials are forms of personal expression. Their writers can, should, and often do use punctuation as they like. Copywriting, by contrast, serves a single purpose: it must encourage action, whether physical (like buying a product) or abstract (like feeling a certain way about a brand). As most readers of copy are not writers (thank god), we should be sympathetic to their potential newly formed feelings about the dash. Good copy goes down in one mouthful, read and understood before the reader realises they’ve read anything at all. If an em dash interrupts that process, maybe it’s worth pausing before we reach for one.
And yet, despite this, I’m still going to use them. Not as often as AI does (impossible lol), but as required and with a little more thought than I did before. And always in the spirit of this, from Cecelia Watson’s Semicolon, which applies as well to dashes as it does to semicolons:
“There is no need to hate semicolons without let, or love commas unequivocally: you can react passionately towards individual instances of their usage without having to swear allegiance to, or vendettas against, the marks themselves.”
