In Defense of the Em Dash

I spent last week editing em dashes out of my own writing. Dozens of them. Ruthlessly. Because nothing signals "a robot wrote this" faster than a suspiciously well-placed em dash, and I am trying very hard to sound like a human.

The irony is not lost on me.

I was removing correct punctuation to appear more authentic. The em dash wasn't the problem. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do — connecting ideas, adding emphasis, creating a beat in a sentence that needed one. I just needed it to stop doing that so conspicuously, because somewhere along the way, good grammar became a red flag.

And somewhere in the middle of my find-and-replace massacre, I started to feel a little bad about it.

At this point, the em dash would like to say a few words.

"I have been used correctly — elegantly, even — for four hundred years. I connected independent clauses. I set off parenthetical asides with grace and precision. I created dramatic pauses that made readers lean in just a little closer. Emily Dickinson loved me. Journalists relied on me. Academics cited me in style guides.

And now, in the year of 2026, I am being deleted on sight because a bunch of language models discovered I existed and absolutely would not stop using me.

I did nothing wrong. I showed up. I did my job. And now every marketer on LinkedIn is ctrl-F-ing me out of their copy like I'm evidence at a crime scene. I am a punctuation mark. I am not a confession.

Yes, AI uses me frequently. But AI also uses periods, commas, and the letter E. Nobody is out here deleting vowels to seem more human. Nobody is side-eyeing the Oxford comma. So far. But I'd watch your back, semicolon — you were always a little too fancy for your own good."

And so, with its defense entered into the record and promptly ignored by the content marketing community at large, there is only one thing left to do.

Say goodbye properly.

The em dash passed away quietly in 2026. It is survived by the hyphen, the ellipsis, and a generation of writers who now flinch every time they instinctively reach for it.

It did not go quietly. It rarely did. But in the end, it could not outrun its association with AI-generated content that used it correctly, prolifically, and without a single moment of self-restraint.

It leaves behind a legacy of elegant sentence structure, four centuries of faithful service, and a profound cautionary tale about being too good at your job at exactly the wrong moment in history.

Services will not be held. Mourners are asked to express their grief in long, unpunctuated run-on sentences to avoid suspicion.

Rest easy, little guy. You deserved better than this.

And for what it's worth — I'm sorry about the find-and-replace.

But here's what the em dash situation actually made me think about.

We are making real creative decisions based on fear of perception rather than quality. I removed correct, effective punctuation from my own writing not because it was wrong — but because I was afraid of how it would look. That's a strange place to be as a marketer who spends a lot of time arguing that authenticity is the whole game.

The goal was never to write in a way that passes an AI detector. The goal was always to write in a way that sounds genuinely human — specific, opinionated, a little imperfect, and worth reading. Those are not the same target. And optimizing for one at the expense of the other is how you end up with content that is technically "human" and completely devoid of personality.

Use the em dash if it's the right tool. Write the long sentence if it earns its length. Break the formatting rules if breaking them makes the point land harder. The readers you actually want aren't running your content through a detector — they're deciding in the first three lines whether you have something worth saying.

Write for them. Not for the algorithm trying to guess whether you're a person.

The em dash would want it that way.