What’s The Point of Picking on the Em Dash —Writers Use Them Too!

 

First and foremost, this article is written by a human: ME!

I do use AI to generate images, though, until I master GIMP. 

Anyway, let’s talk about the newest victim of the internet grammar police —the EM dash. 

See, I used it. It’s right there in the symbols section. Writers have used it forever, but because AI has been programmed on that data and can blurt out responses using proper punctuation, human writers are being accused of losing their voice. 

If the text contains proper punctuation, no way it was written by a human. Why? Because humans are known to be lazy, and to respond in slang and abbreviations. And when there were no abbreviations, humans invented them so that they wouldn’t have to type in long sentences. 

So if you see a message or comment online that uses (shockingly) good grammar, then it is assumed that a human is not capable of showing professionalism. That they must have taken the easy way out and used AI. 

But let’s face facts. AI is a tool that has been trained on vast amounts of data that includes books, newspapers, etc. They use models to learn patterns and relationships between words, which is how they then respond to us. 

AI did not invent writing or punctuation. They have been trained on data created by humans. Therefore, they learned the EM dash from humans. But now it is as if only the AI has the privilege to use it. If humans deigned to use it to stylize their writing piece, they are branded as inhuman. 

Ironic or plain unfair?

The  Em dash was used instead of a comma, instead of parentheses, and the ellipses. It was supposed to give a sentence some flair. Not that commas and ellipses don’t have personality, but why do we have to abandon the Em dash entirely?

It’s time we stop discriminating against punctuation and let the Em dash be used freely by humans, too. 

The English Grammar Workbook for Adults