The ‘P’ in PhD does not stand for ‘prompt’

Because it’s 2026, the best place to hang out and chat online these days is Linkedin (yes I know, everything is terrible). A week or so ago, I posted a little mini rant there about the humble em dash, complaining that it has become an AI ‘tell’ and that I was self censoring to avoid adding them: Look at those stats: I went LinkedIn viral! The most social media excitement I’ve had in a single day since I quit Twitter in 2023. (Everything is so terrible). I’m not surprised I hit a nerve. As my friend Pat Thomson is fond of saying: “writing work is identity work”. How we write is almost as important as what we write. And not all punctuation is created equal. A well placed semicolon helps you join two closely related thoughts; it adds erudition and a touch of class to any sentence. I like to think of a colon like a drumroll: telling the reader the next part of the sentence matters. By contrast, the em dash is punctuation easy mode—it lets you add a thought wherever you like, without…