Em dash is extensively used — it is a short-line that allows a writer to make asides like this one. ChatGPT uses the em dash so liberally that people refer it as the ‘ChatGPT hyphen’. It is seen in ChatGPT generalized output since the model has been trained on books and papers where it has been widely used. It is a versatile piece of punctuation that lets you drop in extra information without affecting the flow. It gives you the flexibility to write in the way you think.
Excessive use of em dashes is an indication of overstuffing and loosely constructed sentences that may attract editor’s ire. The writing bulges with parenthetical additions and asides. Em dash may fall out of favour and may offend grammar puritans. However, it is the technological assault that affects it more. The typewriters could only make a hyphen key, and em dash could not be accommodated at keyboard. The addicts typed two hyphens to compensate for this loss and to make an em dash while typing. The use of typewriters thus affected the usage of em dash. Word processors and ChatGPT managed to format an em dash, but since then em dash is associated with bot generated writing, and along with other AI detection tools could generate false positions to the extent of branding your writing plagiarized.
Is em dash a messy symbol or symbol of no thinking at all?
Em dash is so named because it occupies about the width of a capital letter M.
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