Em dashes, capitalisation, and the art of writing with a pulse

News just in: the literary police have issued an APB on the em dash 🔎 Rolling Stone reports that this venerable punctuation mark has joined the ranks of “criminal indicators” that you might be silicon-based.

🔗 https://lnkd.in/euDevHCj

Despite being favoured by Shakespeare, Dickinson, Woolf and countless other writers through the centuries, the em dash had apparently become English’s least-used punctuation mark—before algorithms developed their peculiar affection for it. (Hard to believe anything ranked below the semicolon, the grammatical equivalent of raising an eyebrow while smoking a pipe.)

It’s a sad irony: we’re now suspicious of punctuation that once marked a writer as distinctive—when the real distinction has always been in the voice itself.

For what it’s worth, my personal “AI detector” isn’t triggered by punctuation—although a giant klaxon goes off in my head when I read Headlines Where Every Word Is Capitalised Like This—it’s writing that lacks any genuine human touch or perspective. Writing without fingerprints or pulse. Real writing has unexpected quirks and nobbly imperfections throughout: turns of phrase that surprise us; rhythms that pull us in; voices no algorithm could fake.

Someone famously asked the question of AI: “Why should I bother reading something that nobody could be bothered to write?” 🤔

It’s a fair point, and well made. But it’s not the laziness that bothers me—it’s the flatness. I don’t want to read bloodless AI pap: the written equivalent of mechanically retrieved chicken. But AI is simply picking up where lifeless human copy left off; replacing the kind of writing that was already mechanical before algorithms even existed: the kind that never quickened the pulse or made a reader pause.

What matters most to me isn’t whether the words came from a machine or a mind, but whether they resonate. Whether they make me stop, nod, bristle, laugh, share—something. 

Perhaps what we’re really after isn't a simple punctuation test; but writing that captures genuine human thought—messy, creative, playful, surprising, and occasionally breaking the rules for good reason. The kind that reminds us why we fell in love with words in the first place.

So I’ll keep using em dashes—along with every tool at my disposal, AI included. And I encourage you to do the same. Write fearlessly. Run wild through the fields of syntax. Interrobangs, SarkMarks, pilcrows—use them all if they make your words sing. Give the world sentences that don’t just land, but linger; sub-clauses that pulse with life. A punctuation choice that no bot would dare to make.

In the end, it’s not about punctuation. It’s about making someone care enough to read—and how your words make them feel. Everything else is formatting.