Mark Adams Creative

They’ve come for the em dash
—and I’m not giving it up.

Somewhere along the way, the humble em dash "—" became a digital red flag.

And to think—the history of this tiny punctuation mark stretches back to Gregorian chants and medieval monks toiling for years on a single illuminated manuscript. From parchment and vellum, it made the leap to printing presses and movable type. They even survived the age of typewriters—which didn’t have a designated em dash key.

Now, in the AI age, algorithms, detectors, and self-appointed “AI police” have decided that using an em dash means your writing isn’t real enough. Too polished. Too fluid. Too synthetic, perhaps?

But language isn’t code. It’s human—messy, expressive, rhythmic. The em dash is a tool of thought, a breath in text, a bridge between emotion and idea.

To ban it because a machine uses it is to surrender the craft to the code.

So here’s my stance: I love headlines, Oxford commas, and em dashes—but I don’t let AI tell me how to tell my story.