Your Em Dashes Are Showing

Someone in the Loop sent me a LinkedIn post last week and asked for feedback before she hit publish.

Good hook. Clean structure. A little humble-brag setup in the second paragraph. And then, right in the middle, a run of three sentences stitched together with em dashes, one after another, smooth and confident and a little too polished.

I told her the truth. It reads like AI wrote it.

She wrote back fast. "I've been using em dashes for fifteen years. I'm a writer. That's just how I write."

And here's the part I actually had to sit with. She was right.

The punctuation was never the problem

Writers have used em dashes forever. Joan Didion used them like punctuation was rationed and she was hoarding her share. Emily Dickinson built entire poems out of dashes and white space. There is nothing new about a person reaching for a dash to hold two thoughts together without a full stop between them.

So no, I'm not here to tell you to retire a punctuation mark because a chatbot likes it too. That's a shallow read of what's actually happening.

What changed is the density. And the pattern.

When a person uses an em dash, it shows up once in a paragraph, maybe twice in a whole post, doing a specific job: a sharp aside, a breath before a turn, a little drama. When an AI model uses one, it shows up in a cluster. Clause, dash, clause, dash, clause. Every transition smoothed into the same shape. No breath. No specific voice choosing that particular pause on purpose. Just a pattern the model reaches for by default because it makes sentences sound authoritative without the writer having to actually build the authority underneath them.

That's the tell. Not the mark itself. The rhythm around it.

Why everyone's post sounds the same lately

Here's the thing that actually worries me, and it's not the punctuation.

A large and growing share of what people are posting right now was drafted by the same handful of tools, set to the same default voice, with little to nothing fed in about who the person actually is. So of course it converges. Of course a hook about a hard lesson learned, followed by three tidy bullets, followed by a soft vulnerable close, is showing up in feed after feed after feed. It's not that everyone secretly thinks the same way. It's that everyone's using the same unedited default.

The em dash cluster is just the most visible fingerprint of that default. It's the thing your eye catches first. But underneath it is a bigger issue: a real person's specific way of seeing something, replaced by the model's best guess at what "smart" sounds like.

What I told her to actually do

I didn't tell my friend to go find and delete every dash in her post. That would have missed the point entirely, and honestly it would have made the writing worse in a few places where the dash was doing real work.

I told her to read it out loud and ask where it stopped sounding like her voice and started sounding like a voice. Where did the specific story disappear and get replaced by a general one. Where did a sentence that could have come from anyone slide in next to a sentence that could only have come from her.

She ended up keeping one dash. Cut the other two. Swapped a generic line about "showing up for your community" for the actual detail about the client who called her at nine at night because she'd promised to pick up. That detail is the whole post now. Nobody else could have written that sentence, dash or no dash.

The real thesis

It was never really about the punctuation. It's about the fact that a real human perspective, a specific memory, a particular way one person sees one situation, is still the one thing AI can't fake. It can approximate the shape of insight. It can't hand you the nine o'clock phone call that actually happened to you.

Break the rule that needs breaking, and the em dash isn't it. The rule worth breaking is the one where you let the tool's default voice stand in for yours because it sounds smoother. Write it bold, write it specific, and if a dash earns its place in there, let it earn it. Just make sure the sentence around it could only have come from you.

Your story, no permission needed. Not even from the punctuation.