Em Dash and AI
The Em Dash TellJuly 24, 2026 writingaiSomething changed in the last couple of months if not years now. Open Slack, open a Notion page, scroll LinkedIn for thirty seconds, and there it is: a long dash sitting in the middle of a sentence, doing a job a comma or a period used to do just fine. It shows up so often now that it isn’t really a stylistic choice anymore, it’s a tell.A character almost nobody typedThe mark is the em dash.
- ▪The Em Dash TellJuly 24, 2026 writingaiSomething changed in the last couple of months if not years now.
- ▪Open Slack, open a Notion page, scroll LinkedIn for thirty seconds, and there it is: a long dash sitting in the middle of a sentence, doing a job a comma or a period used to do just fine.
- ▪It shows up so often now that it isn’t really a stylistic choice anymore, it’s a tell.A character almost nobody typedThe mark is the em dash.
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The Em Dash TellJuly 24, 2026 writingaiSomething changed in the last couple of months if not years now. Open Slack, open a Notion page, scroll LinkedIn for thirty seconds, and there it is: a long dash sitting in the middle of a sentence, doing a job a comma or a period used to do just fine. It shows up so often now that it isn’t really a stylistic choice anymore, it’s a tell.A character almost nobody typedThe mark is the em dash. It’s called that because its width was traditionally set to one em, the width of the letter M in a given typeface, which also makes it roughly twice as wide as its shorter cousin, the en dash. It isn’t new.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Le Baron de Charlus.
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