(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Being a grammar snob is so 2012 but I’m probably not alone in this one. Seeing the em dash (—) go mainstream wasn’t on the cards for many years. But now, it’s everywhere, tucked into every second article, LinkedIn sermon and long-form X post that wants to sound groundbreaking but falls flat.
It wasn’t always like this. Outside of yellowing novel pages, em dashes, especially those without spaces on either side, were prevalent in prestige American texts. They belonged in literary-leaning publications like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Pitchfork… publications with writers and editors who know how to break rhythm with elegance for a readership that gets it.
Now the em dash has gone corporate. The issue is not that it’s going mainstream, but how it’s being used.
Blame the machine
It’s ChatGPT’s fault. And that of all other large language models (LLMs) like Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok. For better or worse, LLMs are widely used in writing today. But, while they can assist, most LLM-generated text lacks that personal touch. It reads broad and glossy. Emotionally neutral and safe.
You can often tell when a piece of writing has been LLM generated, not just by its tone, but by its punctuation. The em dash appears like a glitch in the code, levitating where a comma, semicolon, colon or even just a space would’ve worked better. It’s like narrative duct tape — functional but overused.
And yet, humans are letting it slide. Or worse, they are copying the style without realising why.
The popularity of AI in SA
ChatGPT is the fifth-most visited website in South Africa, after Google, YouTube, Facebook and, sadly, Hollywoodbets. Globally, it received 4.7 billion visits in April alone, up 51% from just two months earlier. In the AI search space, ChatGPT now commands over 80% of the traffic.
People are using it to write everything from school essays to corporate blogs and press releases. Financial challenges, rife in the media space all over the world, are pushing publications to quietly consider the use of AI-generated articles. I’ve heard the whispers and read the actual texts.
One never knows the prompts people are feeding LLMs, but the output speaks volumes. Whole articles, captions and bios that sound templated. You can feel the generic thrum of machine-generated rhythm.
Deeper than punctuation
To me, as an emerging writer in the 2010s, the em dash was aspirational. My Lenovo didn’t have the symbol on the keyboard, but my Mac made it easier, though still a two-key job. In my delusions, I felt the em dash elevated my writing and set it apart because em dashes were never common in South African writing.
Echoing the New York Times style I admired, I’d open with anecdotal leads and pepper the body with em dashes, only to have them stripped out by sub-editors and replaced with spaced hyphens, en dashes or colons and commas.
But today, it’s a different story.
This isn’t to say an em dash is a sign of LLM-generated text. But in a South African text, it does make you pause. There are times when it’s the only punctuation that truly works for cutting across a thought, or surprising the reader, but when you start seeing it everywhere, it becomes suspicious. And points not just to laziness, but no care.
LLMs aren’t writers. They’re tools. With access to nearly the entire internet, they’re brilliant at research, summarising, organising thoughts and even giving technical feedback. But relying on LLMs to write for you, no edits, no effort, is the plastic surgery of writing.
“Basically, AI is a very fancy autocomplete,” says Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School in the US and author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.
It generates responses by predicting the most likely next word based on training data, not by truly understanding meaning. Which means, if you are going to use it, edit.
Start with the punctuation then move on to the other tells.
First, the clause trio, a rhythm AI loves: three short, punchy phrases or words. Those are usually used to punctuate the “it’s not just …, it’s a …” structured sentence.
Next, the Oxford comma, a largely American habit, now cropping up in every other LinkedIn post and amapiano press release.
Then there’s the overly measured tone — serious, but generic. Works best for motivational speakers and, eh, life coaches.
Even when humans write this way without the use of AI, sadly, the work just reads … suspect.
So what now? Write like a human?
Writers are starting to worry. There have been cases where AI filters flag human work as machine-written. X users told one writer to ditch the em dashes, colons and semi-colons altogether.
It’s absurd but real
Editors already have a list of blacklisted phrases. Now, that list includes the punctuation marks and indicators mentioned above — or your work may be dismissed as synthetic. Worse, when applying for a job.
Which brings us to a bigger question: what is AI doing to writing?
Experts argue that, outside the generic sentence-stitching, relying on LLMs is detrimental to our thinking and reasoning capacity.
“It turns you from an active seeker of information into a passive consumer of information and I don’t know if, in the long term, that is a good shift for us to be making,” says Celia Ford, an American science journalist, in an interview with Al Jazeera about using LLMs, as opposed to search engines, where one still has to sift through and consolidate the information.
Ford admits that, through technological tools, humans have been doing a lot of “cognitive off-loading”. She mentions calendar reminders, GPS and even the idea of writing stuff down instead of memorising it.
But, there’s a caveat.
“When we let LLMs write essays or code for us,” she says, “we are giving up something that feels, at least to me, pretty central to humanness; critical thinking and creativity, and we are risking letting these tools think for us, instead of aiding us in our own thinking.”
Always invite AI to the table
However, despite the concerns, the fact is AI is not going anywhere. It may be bad for the environment, but so are fossil fuels and many other technologies we can’t live without.
In an era when publications are understaffed, leading to minimal time spent on editing drafts, I can’t imagine working without Grammarly, which is still a form of AI. It doesn’t write, it’s not generative like LLMs, it assists, it refines what you’ve already put on the page. But sometimes it can suck the soul out of your writing. That’s when the human brain should take over. But, overall, it helps improve the quality of your draft.
Refusing to use AI at all, as noble as it might be, is backward and somewhat masochistic, but also on-brand for humans. All new technologies get criticised by purists. Guns were once seen as cowardly in combat. Cars were dismissed as loud and dangerous by horse riders. Even typewriters were accused of ruining handwriting. How about digitally produced music? We’ve come a long way.
Mollick gets it. “We have never built a generally applicable technology that can boost our intelligence,” he writes. “Now humans have access to a tool that can emulate how we think and write, acting as a co‑intelligence to improve (or replace) our work.”
He’s not afraid of collaboration, however, and he embraces the machine and encourages us to do the same: “Always invite AI to the table.”
“In field after field,” he writes, “a human working with an AI co‑intelligence outperforms all but the best humans working without an AI.”
Tech changes every art form
Technology has transformed all major art forms. In electronic music, computers gave us hi-hats that rattle faster than any drummer could ever play, creating a texture musicians weren’t familiar with. What is the world without trap music and EDM?
In the 16th century, the camera obscura projected scenes onto a canvas, allowing artists to trace subjects, leading to more immersive art.
CGI has made entire universes possible. Marvel’s billion-dollar empire couldn’t exist without it.
Mark Zuckerberg recently said most Meta code will be handled by AI going forward. “It can run tests, it can find issues, it will write higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already,” Zuck said in a podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel.
Writing: What will AI bring?
Maybe speed. Maybe a new kind of prose. Hopefully not just more em dashes in your feed, but a deeper shift in how we think on the page.
That’s only possible if the human stays in control. If we surrender the process completely, what’s left is not writing, just passive copy and paste.
But there are more efficient ways to use LLMs. “It’s not that the LLM is giving me the answers,” said David Perell in his visual essay The Ultimate Guide to Writing with AI, “it’s that the LLM is helping me ask good questions … like shining a spotlight in different corners of my brain and helping me find treasure boxes of insight I would’ve never found on my own.”
Stacy Schiff, biographer of Cleopatra and Véra Nabokov, takes a different view. Even using AI to structure a piece, she argues in The New York Times, “seems less like a cheat than a deprivation, like enlisting someone to eat your hot fudge sundae for you.”
There are lines. Where they are drawn is deeply subjective. But, seeing no line at all should be collectively condemned.