You can pry my dashes from my cold, dead hands

I get it.

The em-dash has been co-opted by LLMs. Survey ten people, and nine of them will say “if there’s an em-dash, there’s AI.”

They’re wrong, but I get it.

If there’s anybody to blame, it’s my mother. For years, she has worked as a real-time captioner for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Her specialty is PITA: pain-in-the-ass classes across a lot of really tricky disciplines. The em-dash is an important tool in writing human speech, because it represents a pause. A pause to, perhaps:

1. Qualify or clarify a piece of information
2. Pause, think, and – if necessary – pivot.¹
3. Take a deep breath; or
4. Be interrupted – perhaps, while you were taking that deep breath.

Those PITA classes she captions are full of those four cases, and so she has been writing more em-dashes than any other human being in the course of her decades of experience.

So: when you see me use em-dashes, just know that– it’s is a genetic thing. I will never escape that original sin.

I would still contend that the em-dash is a perfectly valid piece of punctuation, which is why it’s so aggravating that a) LLMs co-opted the emdash for a period of time; and b) even if they all stopped using it, it’d still live in perpetual infamy with other artifacts of early AI, like multiple fingers or sneaky gay boomer Looney Tunes.

I am willing to entertain that maybe – just maybe – I’m wrong about this. Perhaps I’m down bad with a case of Claude-code Syndrome or have a need to embrace apologisms on behalf of our robot overlords.

So: let’s check the tapes.

From The Archives

Thankfully, I do have a pretty solid baseline of writing on this site over the course of the last ~4 years. While it’d be interesting to, say, crack open my old undergraduate Canvas account to really populate the back-catalog, what we have on-hand will suffice.

Even though it was written a couple years ago, I still hold true to this site’s AI policy: this is the space for me to be bad at writing, so all of the writing in the public portions (and most of the private portions) of this blog are, in fact, my own bad writing.

As of the date you are reading this, my blog has this volume of my own writing:

For the purposes of this work, I’m considering anything with a publication date before my post about GPTinglish to be outside of LLM influence. As best I can remember, I wrote about GPTinglish when Bing first released… whatever their first agent was called, which was the first time that LLMs and chatbots really entered the mainstream².

It’s my hope that we’ll have a solid before-and-after sample. My guarantee is that public notes are purely my own work, and that the vast majority (>95%) of private notes are also my own work. There are occasional portions where I use the private portions of my vault for experimenting with LLM use³), but I’ve done my best to filter out any of those for this data.

So, that’s the first part of this experiment: I am considering anything after GPTinglish to be culturally tainted by mainstream use of LLMs.

What is a dash, really?

This is another question worth being clear about, since I haven’t been internally consistent throughout the last ~10 years of my writing, either. The general timeline is:

1. Pre-GPTinglish, I typically used a single dash without realizing there was an actual difference between - and —. I know, I know: size does matter.
2. Post-GPTinglish, but before em-dashes became A Thing™⁴, I set up a keyboard shortcut on my computer (Opt+-) as a shortcut for emdashes during my Keyboard Shortcut Guy phase of the Season of Systems
3. In May of 2026, I got a new laptop. My Keyboard Shortcut Guy phase was over at that point (and em-dashes had gained their infamy), so I swapped Opt+- to be -- instead of —. I do fold to peer pressure pretty quickly.

Another one you might see in this analysis is the en-dash, which is… smaller than an em-dash, but longer than a hyphen. The only time I’ve ever seen an en-dash in the wild is Maggie Appleton’s recent post about Boundary Objects⁵. Somehow, one or two have snuck their way into my own blog. I can assure you: I don’t know how they got there. Those responsible have been sacked.

That aside: all that context is important to know, because “a dash” and “which dash” are two different questions.

As for when a dash is a dash, these are the rules:

1. it has a space before it, after it, or both; and
2. it’s in my own prose: not in a quote, code, or math.

The four kinds, then, that we’re going to see here:

As far as spaces go: it is a dash if there is a space after the dash. I have recently gotten in the habit of trying to justify my sins by doing the more traditional form of dashes– where they occur immediately after the word they interrupt– but I do still have plenty of history giving them space (--) on both sides.

Let’s crack into the data.

Sins per unit time

In the graph above, you’ll be able to see all of my private notes, stripped down to my own writing where applicable, and only in cases where there is >100 words to analyze. While I have a policy of not publishing *all* of my notes, I figured that aggregate statistics would still be fine.

Remember: the goal, here, is to see if there are noticeable trends before and after GPTinglish. Admittedly, there is an uptick of dashes in the post-GPTinglish era! When I was originally compiling the data, there were some cases, like the Dice Widget, that caused the data to look like it had extremely high outliars.

Even after filtering out those, though, we can see that the emdashes are not only higher, but they increased over that period. Even going back and reading the note about APL’s Agricultural Valleys pattern, I gotta say: that guy was being pretty gratuitous with the dashes. I’d understand how somebody could say it has a slightly GPT-ish aftertaste.

One interesting pattern, though, is that period of time after my laptop broke and I reverted back to -- over true em-dashes. I think that there was something about facing even having a shortcut, with the hindsight of the bad reputation emdashes got, that did make me far more conscious of using them. While I would still contend that those four cases I state above are absolutely valid use of the mark, there is such a thing as over-seasoning.

Am I the Baddie?

Ultimately, this blog is still meant to be a practice ground to become better at writing and communication. Even if the em dash is perfectly valid punctuation in a void, the cultural context does have some weight to it. From a recent post about LLM voice from Martin Fowler:

Another post on the other side of the coin by Jim Highsmith talks about cases where using an LLM to communicate may be necessary, so it feels dangerous to dismiss something that has hints of generative assistance. Regardless: if something about my writing takes somebody away from the point of that writing, I probably should do it less.

Sentences, paragraphs, and so on

This post is also groundwork for some other pieces I’m working on at the moment around writing structure and mechanical improvements. For the sake of exploration, I also have some of the some analysis by sentences and paragraph length:

Interestingly enough, I don’t actually see much of the same trend in these lengths. This is doubly surprising to me: first, because I’d have thought there would be some cultural artifact once LLMs became mainstream. Secondly, though, I’m surprised because I’ve actually been actively trying not to let my sentences and paragraphs run on as long.

Perhaps a more…

aggressive…

approach is in…

order?

The way these graphs are set up, they’ll continue to track along with future notes. I’d be interested in reviewing these in a year and seeing if any of the metrics have shifted around a bit in the “Future” era.