To be fed the em dash being conflated with AI?

[MyWarmOchreHare]

I’ve always used it, although usually just in dash format for the sake of ease. It comes as easily as full stops and commas.

Why is everyone just now discovering it? I’ve just completed a job application and went and edited my dashes out in case they followed this trend of thinking it indicates AI.

It’s actually genuinely really annoying me that people who have lived under rocks or who’ve never written anything since school are accusing people who’ve got a reasonable grasp of English of being AI.

Although it makes startlingly normal the, what I thought at the time was very strange, episode where I’d written something for a colleague and he asked ‘what are all those dashes for?’

We went to the same school and he’s only five years younger.

It’s beyond annoying. Lots of us know how to and regularly do use an em dash. It’s more astounding that so many people think it’s unusual.

I mentioned this on another thread yesterday but I'm a civil servant and when I joined 13years ago, we were all taught to use en/em dashes in our written documents and briefings. I find it very strange its now so associated with AI.

An en dash is not a hyphen.

hyphen -
en dash –
em dash —

I love a semi colon!

My A Level history teacher liked sem colons and thought they were neglected. He was always encouraging us to use them (appropriately, of course).

His teaching methods were a bit dry, but by God he taught you how to write an essay. I've always been grateful to him for that.

I’ve started using em-dashes recently just because I saw them around, and thought they looked useful.

I don’t know what the actual rule is, if there is one, but how I use them is as a slightly-less strong version of parathenses, where you wouldn’t want to break out of the voice that the rest of the sentence is written in. Hence the content between the dashes should be a single clause, there shouldn’t be a conjunction or preposition either side of the em-dashes, and the effect should be to continue an urgent train-of-thought so they’re often a brisk qualifier to something already-said and so I suppose I wouldn’t usually even put a verb in there.

In summary: em-dashes are somewhere between commas, which delineate separate clauses, and brackets (which I use where a separate voice intervenes). While to some they appear unusual—an interloper to our sacred tongue—they are nevertheless a welcome addition to our armoury.

Fascinating. I’m a journalist and don’t use AI and only heard about this assumption/theory on here. Could someone post a piece of AI written work so we can see how it uses the dashes?

As others have said, em-dashes are American. We don’t use them in UK English. We use lovely, neat en-dashes.

I’m an editor and just edited a manuscript full of em-dashes. I changed every single one.

I’d assume the AI thing is just that AI is really American? Or does using em-dashes flag as AI in US English too?

As do I, but am now troubled to discover the existence of dash etiquette and usage.

I have been using a - all unaware of the M-dash, N-dash subtlety.

Another semi-colon fan here; I'm hoping they don't catch on.
Although AI is unlikely to ramble as much as me. Or use the MN special manic grin

I genuinely don’t see how people can write well without a grasp of the semi-colon. Dashes I can take or leave. I don’t encourage my students to use them in formal writing anyway but they are proving a reliable marker of AI use.

Em dashes were commonly used in the 19th century. For example, Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, and Vanity Fair.

I love a good semi-colon!

Sorry that stuff really pisses me off. The utter hypocrisy of saying no AI yet using AI to see if AI has been used is ridiculous…

they aren’t even accurate. I wrote an article for a client - spent 3 hours writing it from scratch. Grammaely told me it was 87% AI generated! fucking bollocks.

what happens is id you write something on a common topic, its more likely to consider it AI because its knowledge of that subject matter is much higher.

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’

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

Out of curiosity, how are the job applications that use AI obvious?