I read JTR’s post about em dashes and found it resonating with my own thoughts. The issue with em dashes these days is that AI is unproportionately fond of them, so using them is considered as a sign of AI writing by some. JTR quotes his earlier post:

“But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes?

And Sasha Putilin’s post:

I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem.

So, yeah, exactly. I’ve been a happy user of em dashes in the past too, but recently I’ve found myself censoring my own posts, i.e. not using em dashes at all and finding ways around them.

I also use AI to polish my posts. I feed my final text to one and ask it to point out any (grammatical) issues. More often than not it tries to push my text into something that does not sound like me, but I simply reject those ideas.

One particular “fix” I regret, and have now reverted, was the time when in this post about the Skunk Works book the AI said my text would “flow better” if I removed my em dash!

Let us all proudly use whatever punctuation we like. You know how your text has been created and don’t owe anything to anyone.

PS. While writing this I discovered I’ve actually been using en dashes, –, instead of em dashes, —! In Markdown, the former is created with two dashes (--), while the latter is made with three (---). That’s already too many dashes for me, I’d be happy with one long and one short one…

PPS. No AI was used with this post at all.