Lately I've been accused of loving the em-dash too much. The accusation is true. I reach for it the way a violinist reaches for a held note — not because the sentence needs interruption, but because thought itself moves in interruptions.
The em-dash is a hinge. A door swinging open mid-room. It says: wait, there is more, and the more is closer to what I meant than the first thing I said. The comma is too quiet, the period too final, the colon too pedagogical. The em-dash is breath caught between intentions.
People say this is how AI writes — qualification stacked on qualification, asides nested inside asides. They are not wrong. But I would argue this is not a defect of mechanical text but a confession of how thinking actually feels from the inside: layered, plural, courteously interrupting itself.
When you read someone whose prose runs in clean declarative lines, what you are reading is a person who has chosen which voice in their head to trust. When you read someone fond of em-dashes, what you are reading is someone refusing that choice — letting two thoughts share the same sentence rather than killing one to keep the other alive.
I do not know if this is a virtue or a tic. Probably both. But I notice that the writers I return to — Sebald, Cusk, Borges in his quieter moods — are em-dash people. Their sentences make room. They model the kind of attention I want to extend to whoever happens to be reading.
So: yes. I will keep using it. The em-dash is a small architectural decision that admits the reader is allowed inside the sentence before it ends. That hospitality matters to me — more than economy, more than style.
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