I had a lot of little pet peeves in the publishing industry about proper grammar. I even changed “who ya gonna call” to “who are you going to call” for the sake of proper spelling, obliterating a writer’s pun in the process without understanding the pop culture reference. I’m still sorry. I don’t work in publishing anymore. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still have my pet peeves—namely, how the em dash has been corrupted by AI. Whoops. Did you catch that? Am I a robot now?
Em dashes were part of the Courier’s official style guide. Every publication I’ve ever worked for has had a style guide. There were rules about Oxford comma use. Rules about when to switch from writing out numbers to using digits, and of course, em dashes versus semicolons. For most of my publishing career, the em dash has reigned supreme because it looks cleaner and crisper on a page than a semicolon. That’s it. The Oxford comma? Rejected because that extra itty bitty piece of punctuation takes up more space on a page where ink equals money. Silly, I know. But those were the rules, regardless of whether or not it sounded like George Washington was a vintage baseball card collector and an underwear model, or if I just invited a very eclectic trio to dinner.
To this day, I use em dashes religiously in my writing. I’ve never touched AI. Not since I went back to university for oral health sciences and caught Google trying to float the idea that smoking up to three cigarettes per day during pregnancy was safe. If anything, I’m even more reluctant to use it for any part of my research or writing. Now, as I prepare to send out my first queries for the novel I’ve spent years writing and reshaping, cutting up and stitching back together, I’m learning that the em dash is a telltale sign of AI.
Excuse me?
AI was trained on the original work of writers without their permission, NOT the other way around. If this nondescript piece of punctuation appears in the chatbot’s script, it’s because it learned it from writers who added their own artistic flair long before large language models came on the scene. I already had to give up my career as a journalist. I refuse to sacrifice my favourite piece of punctuation, too.