I love me Some Em Dashes, and I Don't Care

They’ve been sneaking up on me again in my own writing, and I’ve been trying to catch them, changing them to colons. That’s alright for the most part; it kinda works. Kinda. And then this guy1came along: …colons are so nearly useless — they are the same width as a comma and unlike periods they don’t change the register of the following letter. Em dashes are of a clearly different length. And most colons are better off as em dashes to delineate different parts of the sentence. The problem with Em dashes these days is AI of course. Sasha has an answer for this as well: I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.…