“Are you a witch?”
[hushed Attenborough voice]
In the lush literary jungle, we observe the em dash in its natural habitat. Notice how it moves with remarkable agility, seamlessly connecting two related thoughts that a comma simply cannot hold together. Watch… there. See how it creates that perfect pause? Not quite a period’s full stop, but far more dramatic than a comma’s gentle entr’acte.
[drop_cap]F[/drop_cap]or centuries the em dash roamed free. Emily Dickinson wielded them like daggers; David Foster Wallace grew them into tangled thickets—because why the hell not? No one batted an eye.
Then the machines learned to write.
Suddenly every AI was churning out sentences slathered with em dashes—because somewhere deep in its neural networks it had decided: this is how humans write. IT GOOD. And before we knew it, the em dash became the new six-fingered hand of text: instant proof you were reading something soulless.
Now when I type—and man, here’s the perfect spot for one—I freeze.
Will this em dash get me burned at the stake? Should I use parentheses instead (ugly, clunky things)? An ellipsis… like some nervous teenager?
If your 2025 text contains more than four em dashes, congratulations, you’re legally a robot.
So I have begun rationing them. Two, maybe three per post, doled out like wartime cigarettes. I weigh each one the way a Michelin chef weighs an extra gram of salt: Is this clause truly worthy?
The silver lining? I’ve probably never thought as much about the beauty of the em dash as before. And thus, I’ve come to really appreciate it.
In German, my mother tongue, we never had this problem. We use the em dash’s shorter cousin: the en dash – with spaces – and everyone stays calm. But the English em dash—no spaces, no apologies, shoved straight into the vein of the sentence—is a lawless, glorious beast.
And now it’s endangered.
If your 2025 text contains more than four em dashes, congratulations, you’re legally a robot. The purity police are already in the comments with pitchforks.
So this is my small rebellion. I refuse to let the bots steal my favorite punctuation mark. I will keep using it—sparingly, yes, but defiantly—until they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Long live the em dash—even if it kills me.
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