And I’ll be damned if I stop using them now. I’ve been using em dashes since I started writing—because they work.

They do things that other parenthetical devices like commas or parentheses don’t do.

They add force to your arguments. They separate potentially unrelated but still relevant or useful thoughts—have you ever noticed this?—from the point you’re making.

And for those of you who say that there’s no way to recreate them on a computer keyboard…

Shift + Option + – (for Mac users) gives you —.

Here are 11 of them: — — — — — — — — — — —

Also, there are two other types of dashes.

– (press only the dash key) is a hyphen most often used to separate compound words.

– (made by pressing Option + – on a Mac) is called an en dash and can be used to separate things like dates (April 20–23).¹

And then you have the glorious em dash.

Why do they show up so often in AI writing? It’s simple: most of the best writers in history made (and still make) liberal use of it—because it works! And because AI has imbibed all the writing ever written, it also uses it quite often.

Does AI use them too much? Absolutely.

Does that mean we should stop using them? Absolutely not.

So what’s the solution? You get really damn good at writing.

Develop a style of your own, a voice, a way of writing that sounds like you—and only you. So when people read your writing, they know that you did it, not an AI.

And you’ll be able to use fifty em dashes in a single piece if you wanted to, and no one would care because they would know, simply because of your personal style, that you were generous enough to take time out of your day to share something worth reading.

If you write well—and like yourself—you’ll be fine.

(Ann Handley actually beat me to this a long while back. But I was so incensed by no less than 7 posts about this yesterday that I had to say something.)

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1. Unfortunately, there is a feature in WordPress’s code that prevents the three different dashes from rendering properly. I didn’t realize this until after I publish. So if you’re reading this on my site instead of in email, you won’t be able to see the difference between them.
   
   You can test this for yourself: pull up a blank document somewhere on your computer and try all three keystroke combinations.
   
   Also, this is a great reason to subscribe to my email newsletter, so you’ll see it rendered the way it’s supposed to. ↩︎