Why one punctuation mark should not be punished for sounding too human.

I never used to touch the em dash. Through most of high school and even into university, it sat on my keyboard like an uninvited guest—familiar but unnecessary. Commas, semicolons and the occasional dramatic ellipsis felt like enough. Then I became the opinions editor for The Sheaf, and suddenly I was exposed to it repeatedly. The em dash is efficient, as it can pivot and emphasize—all in a single stroke. The more I wrote and edited, the more I realized the em dash did not just punctuate, it enhanced my creative writing.

However, these days, the em dash has found itself in a strange situation where its usage is accused not of bad grammar or misuse, but of being an “AI tell.” Some professors and editors now treat this punctuation choice as forbidden fruit, a stylistic red flag suggesting your work might not be fully human. The reasoning is not entirely baseless, as AI-generated text often leans on the usage of em dashes to simulate a conversational tone, but this conclusion is unfair.

There is an irony here. The same generation being told not to use the em dash is also being told to “find their voice.” For many writers, the dash is that voice that allows you to sound like yourself, to write the way you think. It is punctuation with personality. It conveys hesitation, surprise or afterthought without needing to over-explain myself. To call it an AI marker is to miss why it became so popular in the first place, because it mirrors how people speak and think in 2025.

The concern is understandable of course. Academia and journalism are struggling to separate human writing from machine-assisted work. The rules are shifting under everyone’s feet, and no one wants to be caught on the wrong side of a plagiarism detector. For now, maybe it is safer to avoid the em dash in formal essays, at least until detection tools stop confusing stylistic flair for algorithmic usage. However, that does not mean the dash deserves exile. We can acknowledge the current uncertainty without flattening our language.

For creative writing—for opinion pieces like this one—the em dash belongs. The same way painters rely on brushstrokes or musicians on timing, writers rely on rhythm. The dash provides it. To censor it entirely is to ask writers to stop breathing mid-sentence.

My own relationship with it changed when I started writing publicly. As an editor, I noticed how writers used punctuation to pace emotion. Some rely on short sentences for precision. Others stretch ideas across commas like they are testing endurance (I can be one of these writers a lot of the time). The em dash sits between this, giving room for one’s thoughts without losing structure. Once I began experimenting with it two years ago, my sentences started feeling more like me.

With the panic of AI, every stylistic quirk was suddenly deemed suspicious. The em dash, which had quietly done its job for years, was now a scapegoat. I have heard the constant rhetoric that if one uses too many em dashes, their professor will assume ChatGPT was utilized. The implication was clear that writing naturally might now be mistaken for writing artificially. This is not only inaccurate, but it is discouraging.

There is also a historical misunderstanding at play. The em dash is not new, but the difference now is the volume of it. More people write publicly than ever before; blogs, captions, essays and newsletters all rely on tone, which relies on punctuation. The dash’s popularity reflects linguistic evolution, not machine presence.

If anything, AI copied the em dash from us. It noticed how we use it to sound conversational and vulnerable—then replicated it. That should be seen as a compliment to human expression, not a reason to abandon it. We created something worth imitating.

However, even writing this right now, I feel hesitant. The academic world is not ready to distinguish between “influence” and “assistance.” Maybe, for now, restraint is practical. Keep the em dash out of essays where its presence could complicate authorship. However, outside the classroom, we should not have to police our punctuation to prove our humanity. Creative writing deserves to remain rhythmically free.

As detection tools evolve, the panic will fade. Soon, software will analyze vocabulary depth more effectively than counting punctuation marks. In the meantime, we should not let fear reshape how we write. The em dash did not ask to become a symbol of suspicion, but it just unfortunately became even more popular in the wrong way.

For me, the dash has never been about aesthetics, but about how it works with the flow of my writing. It captures the pauses we make when we are thinking out loud—the quiet interjections between ideas that commas cannot always showcase. To remove it would mean writing less like myself as an opinions editor. Removing the em dash would make us less like the generation that grew up online, learning to merge thought and tone in real time.

I am not giving up the em dash. It is part of how I write, how I edit and how I think when writing creatively. If AI happens to imitate that, so be it. I would rather risk resemblance than erase rhythm. The truth is, technology will always borrow from humanity, not the other way around.

The em dash deserves its place, but not as a suspect. It has endured editors who either praise it as elegant or condemn it as excessive. It remains unbothered and adaptable. For now, using it makes some people skeptical, and maybe that is fine too. That skepticism keeps us aware of how punctuation shapes rhythm and tone. The em dash expands and connects ideas in ways that commas or periods cannot at times. It means the em dash is doing what it has always done best—reminding us that language, like thought, does not always fit neatly within the lines, and that sometimes, the most meaningful pauses are the ones we invent ourselves.