em-dashes

I did some writing growing up — it was part of the curriculum — but not in the way writing is taught in the United States. As a result, my grasp of punctuation and sentence structure has been something I’ve picked up along the way rather than because of formal education. I know there’s still plenty of room for improvement, but it is a journey. One of the more surprising recent lessons on this journey has been about em dashes. Anyone who’s worked with LLMs over the past couple of years knows they love an em dash. It’s become something of a tell for AI-generated writing. My takeaway from noticing this was actually the opposite of what you might expect — I realized I’d been using hyphens where em dashes belonged all along. So, in a funny way, I’m grateful. These models inadvertently taught me something about English punctuation I should have known sooner. You’ve been seeing more em dashes around here lately. I hope to continue using them in the right places.