I don’t mean to be bitter or anything, but up until a few years ago, the em dash was my secret weapon. Now everything’s changed. Like a magician who blows up the Magic Circle, AI has taken to copywriting like an iconoclast without shame.

No one taught us to use em dashes in school. I went through an entire education, including university, writing essays that never had a whiff of an em dash. That just wasn’t how you wrote. You used commas, dammit.

So fresh and so clean

The em dash was, before the advent of AI, the special preserve of the copywriter. Since ordinary people were never taught, and wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to use an em dash in their writing, it was the writer’s magic trick.

“Wow”, they would say, “you’re copy is so punchy. So immediate. We can really feel the energy here.” Yes, I am using other tricks right here, in this sentence, that are slightly less obvious, but AI is intent on blowing the whole game.

Now that a solid career built on the edifice of the em dash is being torn up by the Large Language Models’ insistence on using it willy-nilly, to the extent that AI speak and the em dash are now synonymous, the humanoid has to rethink its strategy.

Desperate times call for the en dash

If we are all iconoclasts now, then it’s time to play dirty. Dashes are obviously a more immediate and engaged way to write than the comma, the colon or, god forbid, the semi-colon. The solution is to get experimental.

What I always liked about the em dash was that it also hinted that you were more aesthetically minded than the average writer. It looks good on the page. Alas, such subtle shorthand for creative brilliance is gone forever.

I have for some time begun employing the en dash as my new em dash. Sure, it’s a corruption, but it performs the same function, and it doesn’t look AI since AI hasn’t thought of it ye…… oh damn.

Want more words – try out my blog on the history of zeds and zees