In defense of the humble em dash

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In defense of the humble em dash

Published: 21 Jan. 2026, 00:05

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Jim Bulley

The author is a columnist at the JoongAng Sunday and head of content strategy at Korea JoongAng Daily.

In the past year, a curious debate has flared up in the world of English writing: Whether the em dash — that long, unmistakable line — has become a liability in writing.

For generations, the em dash has been a quiet workhorse of English prose. It lets writers interrupt themselves or slip in an explanation without breaking momentum and is more assertive than parentheses and more agile than a comma. The em dash has long made itself indispensable, particularly in journalism. Used well, it makes a writer's thoughts come alive in a sentence.

And that, seemingly, is now the problem.

Across online English-speaking spaces, the em dash has begun to function as a kind of AI “tell” or “red flag.” The issue is not that human writers don’t use em dashes. They do, and have, as far as I can tell, since the 15th century. The issue is that AI-generated text uses them relentlessly and often unnaturally, and the pattern is very difficult to ignore.

A mobile phone display showing the icons of artificial intelligence (AI) apps Deepseek, Chatgpt, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini in Berlin, Germany, 31 October 2025. [EPA/YONHAP]

This has led to punctuation-based skepticism. Post something on LinkedIn with an em dash, and it’s seen as AI slop. That reflex is even creeping into journalism as well, with some readers now treating the appearance of an em dash as evidence of AI use rather than a stylistic choice.

An unfortunate result of this phenomenon is that writers are starting to self-edit — not for clarity or rhythm as they should be, but for perceived credibility. Style is being sacrificed to pre-empt suspicion, and while this side effect started with em dashes, who knows where it will end. After all, AI is also dangerously fond of short, clipped sentences and the rule of three.

Sacrificing the em dash is a huge loss. It has a long and honorable history in English prose. For decades, reporters and columnists have relied on it to manage a text’s pace, stack facts and add nuance without resorting to the stiffness of a semicolon. It keeps complex sentences readable; when used sparingly, the em dash is one of the cleanest ways to guide a reader through a layered idea.

Even the name has its roots in the printing press. In traditional typography, an em dash was roughly the width of a capital “M.” The shorter en dash — the width of an “N” — usually connects ranges and relationships, as in pages 12–15 or the Seoul–Busan line. The hyphen is even shorter and binds words rather than thoughts.

As an English journalist and editor, this is the hill upon which I will plant my flag. The em dash is one of the most useful tools in a writer’s toolbox, and I refuse to bow to the idea that just because machines have learned to use them badly, we should in some way limit our use of language too. I will remain an unapologetic user and defender of any and all punctuation because writing well has always depended on judgment and intent, not on second-guessing how a sentence may be received by a reader caught up in an AI witch hunt.