Ordinally, I should not have bothered joining this raging, rather exhausting discourse of em-dash being an immediate give away that someone has used ChatGPT for their writing.
But since even renowned writers that I cherish and aim to emulate their mastering of words and envy their written expression are divided on whether writers should use em-dash or not, I feel to point out something that seems not to be obvious to many yet.
This debate about the em-dash seems to have become a proxy for a much larger conversation about authenticity in writing, particularly in the age of AI. But before we get into that, let's take a step back and talk about dashes in general. It seems many people — and I'm including some very smart writers in this — don't fully grasp the distinction.
In literature and formal writing, there are three primary types of dashes, each with its own purpose:
