In Defense of the Em Dash

Published on May 04, 2025

As a professional writer of legal stuff—and the spouse of a former newspaper editor—I’ve used em dashes as long as I can remember. They’re handy way to go down a mental rabbit trail in the middle of a sentence while still maintaining a professional level of typography.

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.

Id.

But AI has ruined the reputation of the em dash. For whatever reason, along with bullet points, emojis in headlines, and pastry-chef levels of glaze, AI has been known to heavily use the em dash—so much so that it’s considered a “tell” that the article you lovingly hand-crafted was really produced by a machine.

And this is a little surprising to me. In all of my interactions with AI, its output mimics the median human—albeit one with a vast memory. And the median human just doesn’t use em dashes enough—see Butterick, supra.

If you see an em dash prefaced by an emoji in a bullet-point list, then yeah, it’s probably AI. But just em dashes without the other garbage? Err towards the human.