I want to talk (and partly rant) about the AI-driven bastardisation of the punctuation I am obsessed with—yes, I am talking about this thing I just used. This "—" long dash. The dash with the width of the letter M. The em-dash.
Context first. You'd have noticed a visible shift in punctuation ecology. More em-dashes, everywhere. Sharply correlated with rise of AI use. So what used to be a sign of stylistic flair (kind of) is now in your email texts.
This is not surprising: AI learns "good writing" from pattern-matching, and good writing uses diverse punctuation, including em-dashes. So it's here.
This is okay. What's not okay is how my use of em-dashes is perceived as a sign of bot-driven writing. (Yes, people have asked, and I didn't know how to respond.)
So, a short love story (read toxic obsession) with this thing of beauty.
Let's start with grammar gyaan. There are three horizontal lines that serve as punctuation: in order of their width, they are hyphen (-), en-dash (–), and the em-dash (—).
Hyphens are the most common. So many people use them (often incorrectly). I do too.
En-dashes and em-dashes, rare. We're not taught about them in school and they're not available on the keyboard. (Press "option+shift+hyphen" on Mac to make — appear.) And unlike commas and fullstops, you can write whatever you want without —. It's not a necessity.
Our talking stage started when I observed it in the writing of my colleague G Sampath at The Hindu in 2016. His prose was the most fun in our paper—and it had... many em-dashes. They caught my attention. I didn't understand what this thing was, until a friend formally introduced me.
That was it. I started overusing them. It’s like the first time you wear linen pants and then can’t stop wearing them. Language has aesthetics: there's meaning, yes, but there's also a sensory appeal—visual and auditory, beyond mere cognition—in how words are arranged on the page, how they sound when you read them aloud in your head.
Em-dash nastily hijacked my senses for two reasons.
One, its versatility: it replaces commas to add more emphasis, makes space for parenthetical thoughts, creates dramatic pauses and endings.
Second, it enabled me to mirror more of my thought patterns in my writing patterns. Club that with more careful deployment of colons and semicolons and parentheses, and you can add more texture and rhythm to prose.
This took me years of work, and I'm still so far from where I want to be. And now, the flattening of language by language models is making my intentional choice look like signs of fakery. It's heartbreaking honestly.
So I do worry if the automated generation of language might slowly and imperceptibly erode how writers like myself learned to love the structure of language, how we found our voice, how we stylistically started breaking rules. In our humble attempts to create art after craft.
This is why we do this. Why we obsess over sentences. And why we will continue to.