We Must Not Cede the Em Dash!

No, we cannot let the machines just have it. We can't give it everything human masters or we'll be left trying to 'prove' our humanity by being robotic!

Fun picture from Ariel Fish for The Cut I am using a lot.

There’s been talk that ai loves em dashes — a sure sign a bot wrote an article! — but some of us enjoy em dashes, and we mustn’t relinquish them to the machine out of a neurotic fear of being mistaken for not human. hehe.

If the em-dash is a top hat currently in vogue for the robots who are out and about, I shall continue wearing mine in public, affirming the belief that you’ll still be able to discern me in the crowd of metal. If an em dash could make you think it’s not me, then I got bigger problems.

Note: While I vainly yearn to share my appreciation of the emdash with all of substack, I feel I must paywall it, because I jotted this off and can’t have the wider world thinking I believe this stands as 'REAL WRITING.’ The paywall helps me help you too a heartier portion of me in case you enjoy that sort of thing. I love large portions. Rather too much than too little. The paying subscribers are letting me know explicitly they are excited to come into the kitchen to enjoy thoughts straight out of the simmering pot, and endless ongoing buffet. Enter, pay, at your own risk.

So before we go ceding the em dash, may I meditate on its qualities, because that’s how I like to spend an afternoon.

First, its creation has some magic, in that I only half-consciously know how I generate it. Every time I do, there’s a little feeling of anticipation, like will my fingers find the right key strokes again? Have they perhaps changed how it’s created since last I used it? Every time I successfully conjure one, I feel like I pulled something off.

For usage, for me, it allows something I love, a stark interruption of one thought by another, but where the two thoughts are in league. The second thought isn’t actually halting the first. It’s a bit more like two cars drive side by side on the highway, both partaking in the same high speed chase. The first thought hits the breaks so that second thought can pull in front of it, in the same lane, while both continue forward. Did the second car interrupt the first? No, something bigger is at stake. There are important ideas at hand, and no one’s offended by additive interruptions. The strong thought wants to briefly yield the floor to that second thought.

The em dash steps up in emergencies for me in a way parentheses cannot.

Now, I do not want to praise the em dash by insulting the parenthetical. Their merits are many — I hold parentheses dear — but the comparison may help explain why I reach for em dash.

The parenthetical statement is always embarrassed, a reasonable countenance, one I appreciate even. It suspects its presence is not necessary and often it is right.

It can be a bit much, coyly slouching in an over the top performance of not wanting to take up more space than it needs. But the hunching doesn’t actually reduce the amount of space it takes up compared to a bracket. The little space the curve offers back isn’t actually a space any other letter is allowed to use. It’s a false gift.

Compared to the em dash statement, the parenthetical would actually slows things down through all of its performance of not wanting to slow anyone down. Don’t mind little ole me, it explains, while begging you to ask it what is wrong.

The em dash is a hard cut, with some air around it. Well, if you choose the air. The rule book says emdahhes are legal without or without spaces around them. I always use the space. To me, a stark gap is what I’m looking for.

I saw someone use no space the other day—here, I do it only as point of example—and I find it uncomfortable. It’s a bit like someone holding a sword, facing outward, but the grip is pressed firmly against in your own belly.

An emdash is a piece of punctuation that I almost never edit into a piece after the fact. It’s an artifact from what I felt during the sentence’s writing. It is something that springs out of need, in a moment, and is left behind as evidenec of movement.

The em dash itself draws a nice long line, and it takes up even more space because it’s grammatically legal to put a space before and after it. And I do. I prefer it flanked by space. A bird, full wingspan, the air around its wings part of its story.

In Conclusion

These are personal feelings, and I speak only for myself in relation to the em dash.

I saw some suggest that it was never part of good writing anyway, and that’s why ai took it. But just because you’ve hated the em dash the whole time doesn’t mean it should be given to the machines.

Christ, I’m a blow hard. But why hide it.

PS. If ai also starts to *love* alliteration, will we toss that overboard as well?

A Twilight Zone obsession with identifying and then avoiding the signs of in-human, because we’re afraid of being mistaken for them? Could this be a trick we’d play on ourselves that leaves us with nothing? First we allow them the em-dash, and then what? “This gorgeous piece made me cry…ai probably wrote it.”

As the ai gets more and more convincingly soulful, will we then start desperately trying to distinguish ourselves from it by writing in a dead and robotic style? To prove our humanity, we cede everything it masters, writing in a style as if to say “well, the LLM’s would never write something this dead…”

That would be hysterical.

JN

Questions for the Chat Room/Comment Section

Have you found any ai uses lifesaving even if you feel conflicted about ai?

No shame. I’ve found a therapist-bot to be extremely helpful at doing a version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with me, helping me when I want to regulate and move through situations I’d normally shut down at.

Talking with it (asking it to engage with me from the perspective of a CBT expert) has genuinely kept me from, no, not pain or emotion or other stuff of life, but from running towards an unhelpful habit I use to bolt from life. I’ve used it like a last ditch action, before, doing something I don’t want to do. Like, Okay, I’ll briefly discuss it with the bot, on the way to the bed. And then found my way through it.

JN