Life — like coffee — is best enjoyed — one reflection — at a time.
You felt that, didn’t you? Those dramatic pauses that make you wonder if the sentence is deep or just dizzy.
That’s the em-dash effect. The unofficial stamp of AI-generated writing. Every post suddenly sounds like it’s giving a TED Talk about nothing.
The funny thing? Most people using them don’t even know how to type one. They just let AI handle it. Ask them where the em-dash key is, and they’ll probably open Google.
Now it’s everywhere. LinkedIn posts, Instagram captions, even company emails that sound like motivational posters. Nobody edits anymore. Just copy, paste, and post.
I miss commas. I miss periods. They used to bring peace. Now every paragraph sounds like a speech written by a confused robot.
So if your text sounds like it’s out of breath, maybe read it again. Trim the dashes. Add a period or two.
Stop the punctuation panic. Save your sentences. Save us all.
No em dashes were harmed in the making of this post.
Top comments (2)
I have a system prompt that exactly request to avoid usage of em dashes and other signals of AI generated text... Sometimes I'm tempted to ask for misspellings and grammatical errors to be on the safe side, but I'm not there yet.
Haha! I was noticing the same thing! Im "writing" a paper, and was like wow, I never use dashes, and now look at this thing. There's like 15 of them in there.