I’m annoyed by all the hate against the em dash.

As Matthew Butterick captures brilliantly, it adds pauses to sentences.

Or more specifically and importantly for me—it adds pauses to thinking…which might then become sentences.

Here’s what Butterick says about them.

The em dash is used to make a break between parts of a sentence. Use it when a comma is too weak, but a colon, semicolon, or pair of parentheses is too strong. The em dash puts a nice pause in the text—and it is underused in professional writing.Matthew Butterick

AI will not chase me away from the good things in life ​

There is a deeper point I want to make about this, which is that I refused to be pushed around by AI’s overuse of a particular thing.

AI is copying us—not the other way around.

Purple interfaces were cool before AI showed up. Em dashes were my favorite level of pause in a sentence before AI showed up.

I just looked, and I’ve used 4,149 em dashes in my writing since 1996. And now some fancy guy shows up and uses them too often and they’re going to chase me out of my own house?

Fuck that.

I’ll make purple em dashes if I want to.

What’s next to be chased away from? Art? Poetry? Love? Wonder? Curiosity? I don’t care that someone else is overusing a good thing that I was already doing.

I refuse to be evicted from life because someone else lives.

It’s annoying that people will—and do—think that I’m using AI to write. But I take it as a challenge to just write better content so it’s harder for them to make that mistake.

A bit more info on the alternatives to em dashes ​

While we’re thinking about it, let’s look at some other ways to add pauses to sentences.

My go-to always has been the em dash. I like the amount of pause it represents, and I think it looks the best as well.

Or at least I used to (grumble).

But if you look at the whole list, it’s not really a matter of strength, but also type.

• Parentheses for me are kind of like an aside, almost like a narrator adding something
• I would say a colon is almost like a lighter em dash for me, but I rarely use them

• I hardly ever use semicolons, either; perhaps I should use them more
• And the period almost doesn’t fit in the list—it’s pretty obviously the big gun in the group

Looking at these, I almost feel like the em dash is for adding a punchline or the heavy-hitting part of the sentence. Kind of like you’ve given yourself a moment to think of the implications, and now you deliver the impact. Which I like the style of.

So like I said above, I think it matches my thinking and how I like to communicate.

Anyway.

Even after all this tough talk I don’t think I can avoid wincing when people ask me if I used AI to write something because of my em dashes.

But I hope I can resist the temptation to stop using them.

AI will continue to get better at doing the things that we cherish, and I refuse to be battered to-and-fro by people’s second and third-order reactions to this.

I’m just going to be me and hope it all works out.