My Em Dashes Are Real — and They’re Spectacular

Nothing's more authentic than my, ahem, perky punctuation.

Self-appointed rulemakers on Substack created an urban legend of Q-anon proportions, asserting anyone who uses Em Dashes is a chatbot who deserves to be tarred and feathered.

Apparently, using even one em dash (this thing —) anywhere in a post — means IT WAS WRITTEN COMPLETELY BY AI AND THE WRITER IS A LYING, CHEATING FRAUD! This bullshit conspiracy has permeated Substack ad nauseam. Blowhards question the validity of bona fide essays for employing a legitimate piece of punctuation.

Frightened at the prospect of receiving 40 years in jail for vandalizing my posts with an em dash, I dejectedly changed my style of writing, reducing my Highly Impactful Em Dashes to feeble commas. Not anymore — I’m taking the em dash back. There’s a new Stand Your Ground law in town.

For those of us who learned punctuation and grammar the right way, those of us who diagrammed a sentence and learned phonics, syntax, and the schwa sound, we proudly, honorably, and defiantly use em dashes. And en dashes– And dashes- And colons: And semicolons; And ellipses… And pipes | and brackets [to clarify].

The learned among us have no qualms using lurid punctuation with NC-17 names like a feminine ordinal indicator ª or an aldus leaf ❧ or a manicule ☞ or a dinkus * or a circumflex ^ or a hedera (see: aldus leaf) or a virgule / or a cedilla (gotcha, that’s just a comma!)

So suck it.

I don’t want to see one more smug post or Note or a subscriber chat by a sanctimonious, self-appointed Crypt Keeper of Punctuation saying that em dashes are the mark of the AI devil. Fuck them. I’ll use an em dash for whatever I please — whenever I please. I’ll use it for interruption, for a dramatic pause — or maybe for nothing at all. Most often, it’s to set off a thought of extreme import or emphasis — of which I have many.

Em dashes are adventurous and tantalizing. When one shows up, put your helmet on because something shocking is about to be typed — like HE DROPPED DEAD. Oops, false alarm — he’s still alive and blabbering about sharks, and about passing cognitive tests.

You have my permission to use 30 em dashes in a post if you so choose. Use 300. Go hog wild with a hot mess of em dashes. They’re sexy — Raaawr!

Do not swap it out for the limp, fun-killing half assed comma. Commas are for cowards. I mean sure, I’ll use those, too, to separate a thought or around the word “too.” Sometimes it’s just more polite. A comma gently knocks and says “Hi, um, I’m your new neighbor, here with some cookies.”

Meanwhile, an em dash breaks the wall down and bursts onto the scene. “The party can start now — I brought the ketamine!”

The punch is spiked — OH YEAH!

See the difference?

Here, you get me, myself and caffeinated I — not Claude, Gemini nor AI. (See that? It’s the neither-nor rule. The lifeblood of grammar nerds.) I write my own stuff — and choose my own punctuation, thank you. I’ll pass on lectures from someone who doesn’t know what a subject is — or a predicate. Don’t tell me I’m doing a copy/paste from AI. Never heard of an adverb? Sit down.

This is America, where our last vestige of democracy is freedom of speech punctuation — and I’ll squeeze every last drop out of it.

Conspiracy most foul

Because this theory has gone full Pizzagate, I tried a test prompt requesting — guess what — excess punctuation. Chat GPT answered my humble query — with only two em dashes! There are an abundance of commas. Surprise! Claude had similar results. As did Perplexity! And Gemini! Waitaminute — are COMMAS the real mark of the devil?!?

I wanted to try Grok, mainly to see if I’d get an answer about white genocide to a query about tulips. But since I’m not a member of the cesspool known as X, that platform remains untested.

This em dash panic is hypermania. I’m not even sure where the conspiracy originated. Maybe earlier AI did use fewer commas and more em dashes for all I know.

Or, how about — hear me out — AI is out here correcting people who never learned grammar and punctuation. Now those same people are having a crisis because a machine is telling them what they should’ve learned in 7th grade! Em dashes aren’t the problem — you are! Buckle up, buttercup. I’m marking my territory with em dashes — whether you like it or not.

Still not convinced? Here’s this entire post — 27 em dashes and all, pasted into an AI detector, and the results. Three other AI detectors said the same thing.

So suck it.

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