alt Hacker News> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought.
I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.
I was surprised to find out in my career that it was rarely used by others. Subconsciously I pulled back on how often I used it — especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence. Important and lengthy documents which I’d written and published (internally) at work still display them. On occasion there have been comments asking if I’d somehow accessed early AI models to assist in writing these works because of their presence. I think I averaged two em dashes per letter page.
I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. An LLM is going to reflect one of many writing styles. If today it’s frequent em dash usage, tomorrow it could be frequent parentheses. Swapping Unicode characters becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the cat always two steps behind. The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work. Review and revise that social contract instead to adapt to the existence of the new tools.
Replies
> especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence
Well that explains a lot. Interestingly enough, I've found that I naturally write like an LLM, or rather the LLMs write like I did. I wonder how many other patterns we attribute to LLMs are common in neurodivergent writing just as a result of so much of the training data being areas of the internet where I'd imagine neurodivergence is overrepresented vs. the general population.
I’ve leaned heavily on em-dashes over the years to help reduce my lisp-worthy overuse of parentheses. My add brain loves adding tangents, (likely unnecessary) context, and excessive completeness. I like both em-dashes and parenthesis b/c they’re visually easy to parse and skim past if the reader finds the extra detail unnecessary.
Funny enough, my kid asked me to proofread their essay the other week, and I noted some awkward comma usage and inconsistent voice. We talked through options for breaking apart sentence clauses as well as punctuation that could do the heavy lifting—specifically semicolons and em-dashes. They thought the em-dash looked cool af and semicolons looked harsh. “I love em-dashes, they’re so cool!”, was fun to hear a middle schooler say.
Ofc their teacher said that their essay was “likely 85% AI assisted.” Fortunately, the change log showed continual revisions during school hours on a managed device (ChatGPT blocked). I emailed their teacher that I had proofed it, highlighted an awkward spot or two, and pointed my kid to grammar devices they could explore themselves and apply if they wished. No harm, no foul.
Fast forward, my kid and their friend were talking about it and the friend told them to do what they do: intentionally sprinkle in grammar / spelling mistakes. le sigh I suggested to them that LLMs can easily do that too and they’re better off just learning to write well as it’s em-dash today and something else tomorrow; that the worst thing would be to dumb down style/vocab/grammar for fear of appearing LLM generated.
> I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core.
It's clearly a joke à la RFC 3514.
I was always taught that overuse of the em-dash is poor style. Oftentimes using more specific punctuation (comma, semicolon, colon, parentheses) more clearly communicates the structure of a thought. Em-dashes are a lot more freeform and informal. They communicate a similar tone as when you're speaking and you suddenly stop to mention something that just occurred to you.
In this sense, the idea that "em-dash = AI" has become something of a strawman. The mere presence of em-dashes isn't what indicates AI, it's the fact that LLMs use them so frequently, and use them for formal structure (where another punctuation mark would work better) rather than informal breaking up of related thoughts.
It should have been an en dash anyway if you are to put spaces around it.
Same! I actually always preferred them because to me they’re more aesthetically pleasing, which reading aloud makes me think I might be a little neurodivergent.
It’s used all the time in legal writing. The backlash seems like something out of idiocracy.
>The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work.
I don’t think writing with AI makes a creation "worse." If anything, it makes it better, if you bring genuine idea and imagination to it first.
The stigma comes from people being lazy and letting the AI do the heavy lifting of thinking. That’s where the "social contract" breaks. But using AI as a multiplier for your own voice and ideas isn’t "subpar"—it’s efficient.
If we start playing "whack-a-mole" with punctuation to find AI, we’re missing the point. The question isn’t what tool was used, but how much of the human's "creation" is actually in there.
conversely, and well, popularly, long sentences were given the kibosh thanks to authors like Hemmingway.
I was told the ellipses is the mark of a 4th grade poet and to never use it.
funny how things change!
> especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence
When you think folks have come up with every inventive way to pathologize a personality trait, they start gatekeeping punctuation. It’s the ultimate reach—turning a standard grammar tool into a "symptom" just to fuel the modern obsession with finding new ways to be a unique victim.
Suggesting that a horizontal line is a diagnostic "tell" for neurodivergence is peak internet brain-rot. It’s not a condition; it’s middle-school English. We’ve officially hit a level of performative absurdity where people are trying to claim clout through a keyboard stroke. It’s not a disability; it’s a stylistic choice.
> I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.
Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for? Together with footnotes, I've always used them like that, but I guess it could also be just a cultural difference. My teachers in Swedish school always told me to put thoughts like that into parenthesizes, but I also just (barely) finished high school, could be related too.
> I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core.
I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it. Is "created ambiguity for human writers who have historically relied upon the em dash as a stylistic device" the problem here?
Trying to solve it by adding just another character and slap the label "Human Attestation Mark (HAM)" on it will just make LLMs eventually use those instead... Not sure what the point is to be honest.