I spent days trying to kill the em dash.
Not hours. Not a lazy afternoon of find-and-replace. Days. Actual back-to-back days of opening documents, hunting for that little horizontal line, and wiping it out one instance at a time like I was running some kind of literary pest control. I tried everything. I rewrote prompts to forbid it. I had AI swap it for commas, semicolons, periods, anything that would make the evidence disappear.
It didn’t matter. The em dashes kept coming back.
Everyone Decided It Was Lazy
The em dash had turned into the punctuation version of a mug shot. You could catch one three paragraphs in and know, just know, that AI had touched the text. It was the tell. The fingerprint. The thing that made a sentence feel like it came from something that hadn’t really thought, just rearranged.
So I wasn’t alone in the obsession. Everybody was at it. Deleting them, replacing them, writing around them. It became a strange little loyalty test, proof that you’d actually read your own work, that you’d done the curation, that you hadn’t just pasted whatever the algorithm handed you.
Every em dash I killed felt like proof I was still in control.
Then I Actually Looked at What It Does
Somewhere in the middle of the crusade, I noticed the em dash actually works. Like, works. It creates a pause. It holds two ideas in tension just long enough for the connection to land. It does the exact job punctuation is supposed to do, setting the rhythm, managing the breath, guiding how a sentence feels as someone reads it.
Which is probably why AI leans on it so hard.
Then something odd happened. I kind of fell for it. Not ironically. Not as a bit. I actually came to love how clean it looked, how it moved the reader’s eye, how it made writing feel less like explaining and more like thinking. No surprise the great writers have used it forever. Who was I to argue? Maybe I should start using it myself.
Right at the moment it was the single loudest signal that writing was machine-made. Ironic. Some things never change.
But Here’s What Actually Matters
The em dash was never really the point. It was just the first tell we learned to spot.
Because about a year on, I stopped treating it as the only marker. The tells had moved. The new ones look different. Throat-clearing openings. Preset structures. That “this, but not that” phrasing showing up everywhere now. TV scripts. LinkedIn. Corporate email. Anyplace a human presumably had a chance to edit and somehow didn’t.
And here’s the trap: by the time you’ve trained yourself to catch one tell, three new ones have already taken its place. The markers don’t sit still. They shift the second we learn to see them.
So chasing them, fighting them, trying to prove you’re human by scrubbing them out, that’s a game you can’t win. You’re always a step behind.
There’s also the part nobody wants to admit. A lot of it is genuinely good writing. It’s just wildly overused. It’s meant to be the seasoning, not the whole plate.
What Actually Changed for Me
I stopped fighting the tells. Instead I built a real practice around the one thing that doesn’t move: curation.
Here’s the actual process. I write a long, rambling first pass myself. Raw concepts, stray thoughts, ideas dumped into a full outline. The part that’s unmistakably mine. Then I bring in AI. I let it think next to me, help me expand, build out the sections where I’m stuck. Then I read the whole thing. Actually read it. I make sure my voice runs through every paragraph. I cut what doesn’t land. I fix what’s off. I edit it the way you edit something you actually own.
It isn’t about deleting em dashes anymore. It isn’t about whatever marker is trending this week. It’s about the discipline of the practice itself, reviewing, shaping, planting your voice in the material until it sounds like you again. I’m enjoying writing this way more than I have in a long time. Maybe I’ll take the training wheels off one day. For now, I’m happy riding.
It Feels Like Hearing a Recording of Your Own Voice
There’s something genuinely strange about hearing yourself sing back on a recording. It doesn’t sound the way it does in your head. But it is you. The same thing happens to me with writing that’s been run through AI and then edited again. The voice feels close but not quite the same. Cleaner, maybe. More shaped.
Like I ran myself through a filter that improved the signal instead of degrading it.
Just no autotune.
So What’s the Future, Actually?
Here’s what I think is really going on: the way forward isn’t humans against machines. It isn’t about proving you did it all solo or that you’re still the one holding the reins. It’s a partnership, and neither side does the whole job.
I bring the intent. The voice. The judgment. The willingness to say “no, that’s not right.” AI brings the expansion, the options, the ability to explore paths I wouldn’t reach on my own. We work together, not against each other.
The tells will keep changing. New markers will surface, everyone will panic, then they’ll turn normal. That cycle isn’t stopping.
But the practice, the real work of reading, editing, and making sure your voice is in the room, survives all of it. It survives whatever’s trendy. It survives whether or not I use my new friend, the em dash.
That’s the real tell.