It took 30 years, but Bill Neville finally ruined my writing.
Not on purpose. When I was a student at Georgia Southern sleeping my way through the student media department, Bill — the student media advisor at the time — taught me about the humble em-dash. How it was different from the pedestrian, downright proletarian hyphen. How to properly set it off with spaces on either side.
The dark, ancient magic of holding down alt+151 to summon an em-dash minion from the depths. The incantation of option+shift+hyphen on a Mac to bring forth its power.
And I’ve used the hell out of ’em. According to a statistical analysis of a few years of my writing, I average 13.9 em-dashes per thousand words. I don’t know if that’s a lot, but it feels like a lot.
Makes sense, though. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you know my blizzard of parentheticals, asides, “oh that reminds me…” tangents — those are just em-dashes of the verbal variety.
But then generative AI came along. Our future robot overlords enjoy the em-dash, too — maybe a little too much. It’s become a cliché that AI writing is punctuated with em-dashes sprinkled around like sunflower husks underneath a bird feeder.
So much of a cliché, in fact, that AI detection tools now lean on em-dash frequency as one of their tells. Formerly a nice, polished tool in any writer’s bag of tricks, they’re as suspect now as someone who tells you Joffrey is their favorite “Game of Thrones” character.
As you can imagine — or maybe not — this has become more than a little problematic in my job search. It’s hard to write how I write without fear of tripping some spurious AI detector that a snake oil salesman foisted on someone’s HR department.
That little line has turned into my scarlet letter.
So for now, I’ve decided to mostly put away the humble, cursed em-dash. At least until I figure out what the next phase of my life looks like. Not gonna lie. I’ll miss the li’l fella.
