To be fed the em dash being conflated with AI?

I was educated in the UK and have never heard the term em dash or n dash

I mark essays too. I would say I can spot bad prompting and editing. I think once the students are savvy with prompting the essay is officially dead.

Just found them on the keyboard. Always learning something new!

Hyphen -
En dash –
Em dash —
Double en dash ––

As someone whose OU tutor always corrected dashes to commas, I feel I want to start using dashes again🥳

Take them out. We don’t use them in UK English and your copy editor will thank you.

I had no idea there was such a thing as an en dash or an em dash.

I just use a dash but it's not something I use frequently.

They aren't word for word identical but it's very obvious. Possibly some of the few that I thought weren't AI did have AI input with better prompt engineering but I'm sure that the AI ones were AI generated. Try recruiting and you'll see what I mean!

Just done some reading because I was doubting myself. En and em dashes have different uses, so I'm going to stick with the em-dash.

Why would you not at the very least look at what AI can offer? I find it hard to believe you're a journalist who hasn't used it!

You’d be surprised. When I’m marking essays, there’s a ‘same-iness’ to the AI-generated ones. They lack soul and personality: there’s no distinctive individual voice to them. I’ve been teaching for a long time, and the sudden advent of essays written by ChatGPT is really disconcerting. Not only is it hugely concerning in terms of the impact on critical thinking skills and academic integrity but it’s incredibly disheartening to see all these students thinking they’ve done something really clever in using Chat when all it’s done is made their work depressingly mediocre.

I recruited recently and didn't pick up it was AI the first couple of cover letters I read but once I had read the same thing over and over it was clear. Same starting phrases, same dot point structure covering key criteria. Way too wordy. Out of 100 or so applicants the few that weren't AI really stood out.

Some are perfect personal statement hitting every keyword with no CV experience whatsoever. Otherwise it's the use of overly professional and flowery sentences which I read across different peoples' applications. They all say the same thing in the same way. I don't mean parroting the job spec back.

Even had one with ChatGPT prompts pasted in and the answer!

Yes but so are semi colons. My point is that em dashes like semi colons whilst currently in usage are not particularly in favour so not widely used. You asked why no one seemed to understand them. I’m explaining to you why?

I ran a scene through Grammarly yesterday. Clicked on the AI detection tool afterwards. Said 8%. I could not fathom why it highlighted certain sentences. Ran it through other detectors. Some said human. 1 said 75% human. I asked ChatGPT who said completely human.

So what do you do when detectors can't agree? AI generates text based on human written text so I use it as a sign that perhaps I need to be more original.

I review job applications. You don't need detectors to identify those obviously written by AI because it is obvious.

I'm also fine with it being used to tidy up an application. It levels the playing field. Just not generating it.

Am wondering if I need to change my em-dash usage to en-dash usage. I have 2 POVs in my book. Mush prefer em-dash but am writing in UK English. 1 character uses them a lot. The second not at all.

There's usually a lot of other indicators though. I've never noticed anyone using an em dash in anything and had to read most of this thread to learn what it is and how it might be used, but when people post AI content on here, it's the writing style that's the giveaway.

I don’t think we were ever taught about dashes, only hyphens when I was a child in the 60s/70s. I only knew the terms ‘em dash’ and ‘en dash’ because em and en would sometimes crop up as words in crosswords or someone used them in Scrabble, so I looked them up. They were described as ‘printers marks’ iirc. Of course back then most people were writing, not typing let alone using computers so the length of dashes and amount of space around them wasn’t defined in the same way unless you were a printer or (I suppose) a secretary.

Yes but many people are writing a ton of emails at work. I give a lot of advice by email or writing comments in a table and it can be quite long. Or distill quite complicated issues into one page of writing. Bullet points and dashes can add a lot more clarity when you know that people are not going to (want to) read large blocks of text and traditional puncuation like parentheses can actually take away from that clarity.

Word puts them in, which always irritates me as I just want a normal dash.

I saw someone moaning about this in a long post on LinkedIn and didn't have a clue what they were on about! I live in blissful ignorance of AI.

Maybe they're older readers.

There was a time (I'd say up to the mid-70s, maybe later) when using any dash in normal text was frowned upon as being rather lazy, unless it was used to denote a range of numbers, and this was how people were taught to write.

We were taught to consider all sorts of other punctuations, eg colon, semi-colon, parentheses before resorting to a dash. One of my friends used to have her homework splattered with red biro round all her dashes, and one history teacher regularly made her resubmit homework with "proper" punctuation.

Em-dashes weren't a thing then, so I may not understand their purpose, but often when I see one I think that I would use a semi-colon or ellipsis to indicate a pause before moving on to the next idea or thing in the text.

It's over 50 years since I left school, and I still pay a lot of attention to punctuation when I'm writing stuff for work or anything formal. And I inwardly wince when I read formal stuff which uses dashes to separate text that really needs to be in parentheses.

They're explaining for me. I haven't a-fecking- clue- what ye are talking about.

I much prefer en-dashes and semi-colons to em-dashes. I just can't make myself accept em-dashes.

The whole AI paranoia is bonkers. AI is trained on human writings; if it uses a lot of em-dashes, it's because it's been trained on millions of human-written documents that use them too. It hasn't gained sentience and decided it's an em-dash fan.

Don't even get me started on using AI to ascertain if something is written by AI, because getting AI to write something is bad but getting AI to check something isn't?

Yes! I use it a lot in reports for work. Sometimes it stays as an en dash but sometimes autocorrect changes it to an em dash.

Yes!!! Was told by my editor the em dash is used for interrupting conversation so is in all my books, I got an awful shock when people online were saying to avoid anything with em dashes in! Saying that I’ve seen the use of it in ai, pretty much scattered around the place, but the average person just grabbed onto ‘all em dashes’