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We’re back with another blog post for Fortelling Writers, focused on giving you the skills, knowledge, understanding and encouragement to craft your best work as an author inside the Fortelling platform.
In this post, I need to address an elephant in the room. There’s been an awful lot of noise on social media over the past few years about AI, and within our writing industry, it’s been specifically centred around the use of something called an “Em-Dash”. So, this week, I’m going to tell you exactly what an em-dash is, why people associate it with AI, and what you can do about it.
Spoiler Alert: It’s got nothing to do with AI, so the TL;DR is that you’re under no obligation to, but you’re free to use it if you wish. How? Read on to find out how it’s best used.
So what is an em-dash (or M-dash)?
It’s in the punctuation family, like a hyphen, comma, semi-colons or full-stop (AKA period mark). It’s named “em-dash” due to its traditional width many years ago, which equated to the width of the capital letter “M” in whatever typeface was being used. For centuries, copyists used it to indicate a break in thought or an important aside.
The History:
To understand the em-dash, we must first understand a little bit about the history of books. The em-dash has its early roots in Medieval times when scribes used long horizontal marks to denote rhetorical pauses or shifts in subject. Back then, all books and other literary works were hand-written by scribes (or copyists), who painstakingly inked every page of manuscript onto parchment or vellum as part of a multi-disciplined, multi-person effort to craft a finished product.
At the time, scribes would use arbitrary flourishes in their writing, such as the vírgula suspensiva (a type of slash mark /) to indicate a brief pause, or a long dash stroke to highlight a shift in thought or subject, both of which early publishers and printing houses struggled to decipher. But when the Gutenberg Movable Type printing press was invented in the 1440s, everything had to be standardised to fit on a straight grid matrix, requiring each rectangular block to be a precise measurement and for every word to be calculated before blocking into the machine.
While irregular punctation marks were ignored in these early days of print, Europeans later formed a straight mid-line horizontal bar to replace those chaotic markings. This new character block was specifically created to ensure pauses, breath, and structural interruptions in a manuscript were maintained by the printing method.
Since the em-dash was already the entire width of the metal block, printers would typically treat it as a separator on its own without the use of spacers on either side. This is why in traditional publishing today, you’ll often find no spaces between words separated by an em-dash.
The Name:
The name for the em-dash itself comes from the language of the old metal shops who manufactured the blocks to be used in the printing press machines. The “em” was in fact a unit of measurement for the metal block spacers used between words, as they fit the exact width of a capital “M”, relative to the point size of the font being used. Because everything needed to be proportional and uniform within this new grid matrix, engineers manufactured a family of three distinct dash marks to prevent chaos: the Hyphen (-), En-Dash (–) and Em-Dash (—).
An en-dash was also named after its width, being the width of a capital N, while the hyphen was derived from the Greek huph' hen (translating to mean "into one"). Metalworkers also often used slang to differentiate between the similarly sounding Em and En, such as “mutton” or “nut”.
The Rise Of The Dickinson Dash:
Writers like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville are some of the best-known advocates of the humble em-dash and contributed heavily to its rise to prominence in how they utilised the mark. Throughout the 19th century, as American literature broke away from the rigid structure of European standards, authors pioneered the use of the em-dash to illustrate the chaotic, messy, tangent driven organic thought of the human experience.
Emily Dickinson is perhaps the most renowned champion of the em-dash. To Dickinson, the comma seemed too brief and a full-stop/period was too final, so she incorporated hand-written dashes into nearly every poem she wrote. She used the dash with intention, to create rhythmic pauses, suspension of time, and a way to hold a breath between intensely emotional thoughts. Unfortunately, Emily was a visionary in her time and the old-hat patriarchal editors of the period were adamant that the dashes signalled an “uneducated grammar error”, opting to remove them from all her works, replacing them with commas and full-stops. Modern scholars have since restored Emily’s dash markings to bring back the true voice to her writings. To some, the em-dash is colloquially known as the Dickinson Dash for this reason.
Walt Whitman made em-dashes commonplace throughout masterpieces such as Leaves of Grass, wherein he would stack enormous lists of imagery together in his sprawling lines, playing with and challenging the conformity of sentence lengths while simultaneously keeping the reader moving down the page.
Herman Melville, famous for Moby Dick, used em-dashes to showcase philosophical and manic inner monologues of the likes of Captain Ahab. He utilised the dashes to violently shift sentences from one thought to another — even mid-thought — mirroring Ahab’s wrestling with his obsession.
The Downfall And Degradation:
As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the mechanical typewriter entered the chat! With space at a premium and the physical keys being costly, manufacturers were forced to cut some punctuation marks, including the em- and en-dashes, which were considered needless “luxury items”. Writers had to settle for the shorter hyphen to carry the weight of expression on its own, as even a double-hyphen was considered “ugly” on the page
Then with the rise of the mass-printed newspaper, editors were also conscious of page and ink cost. Once again, space became a premium commodity, forcing writers to forgo the longer markings in favour of shorter, punchier sentence structure, relying heavily on commas for anything with a pause. Towards the middle of the 20th century, the academic world focused on efficient prose, considering dashes to be “unnecessary fluff” — and even writing guides such as The Elements of Style denounced the em-dash as “lazy punctuation” used by those who didn’t know how to structure sentences properly — which only further served to discourage its use.
The Rise Again (AKA Rise, The Sequel):
With generations passing, the em- and en-dashes were mostly forgotten due to typing on machines without a designated key for the marks. It was only with the rise of software based word processors on modern computers from the late 20th century onwards, that use of these punctuation elements began to rise once again as tools like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, and Google Docs added a simple automated editing tool where if a user types two hyphens, it is magically corrected to an em-dash, and if two sets of numbers are connected by a hyphen, it’s automatically converted to an en-dash, thus forcing proper use of the dashes, leading to a new rise to prominence.
The Controversy and the AI Accusations:
So if the em-dash has such a complex history dating back to Medieval times, what’s with all the controversy? Simply put, because everyday use of the dash still isn’t commonplace and it’s mostly been those extensively using word processors — such as authors — who have brought the mark back to life, it’s jarring for the average person to suddenly start seeing text everywhere, written in ways that haven’t been seen outside of books for generations. This naturally makes people sceptical, and when coinciding with a rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) use, people immediately see the mark as a red flag and assume there is a correlation.
Is the accusation unfounded? It’s complicated. These LLMs (Large Language Models) such as ChatGPT have been trained on all manner of written works from every part of human history and given that these em-dashes feature in a lot of works over hundreds of years, they often dismiss how humans write casually in the modern day and lean more towards a neutral writing style influenced by historical texts. This tends to include the use of em-dashes.
So, does that mean the accused have actually used AI to write? Not necessarily, no. There’s a growing movement of people in linguistic spaces, advocating for the use of punctuation in all its forms, in both creative and academic works. Many authors have never stopped using the dash marks, and many others are adopting them in their own work upon discovering them.
Do you think it’s fair that writers are now facing scrutiny just because they use an often unloved and under-represented punctuation mark?
How To Use An Em-Dash:
Now that you know more about this tiny little line, you might want to contribute to its renaissance. So how exactly is it used in a sentence?
• The em-dash’s primary function is as an alternative to commas, parentheses, colons or semi-colons to dramatically allow interruptions in sentences or emphasise a sidenote.
• Its cadence is meant to mimic natural human hesitation, breathing, and rhythm of inner monologue or dialogue.
• Traditional publishing uses a closed em-dash—like this—with no spaces around it; some journalistic styles — like the one I commonly use in these blogs or in our Discord community — have spaces surrounding the dash to further separate the words and sections of the sentence, called an open em-dash. I personally think it looks prettier with spaces around it and is easier to read; in my novel, however, it might make sense to use a closed em-dash to signify someone cutting off their own sentence with a new thought, for example.
When would you choose to use it? When you want to amplify emphasis, interrupt something, create a dramatic pause, or even rescue a complex sentence from clutter, this is when you should make use of the em-dash. It all depends on how much attention you want to give the information.
How To Type An Em-Dash:
On a Mac/Apple Computer:
• Method A:
- Hold Option + Shift and click the Minus/Hyphen key
• Method B:
- In Apple Pages, type a word followed by two hyphens (with no spaces) and then the next word; Pages will instantly merge the two hyphens into an em-dash
• Method C:
1) Press Control + Command + Spacebar to open Character Viewer
2) Type “dash” into the search bar and double-click your chosen dash to insert it.
On a Windows PC:
• Method A:
1. Press the Windows Key + Full-stop/Period (.) together to open the emoji/symbol menu
2. Click the Symbols icon (a capital Omega Ω) at the top
3. Scroll down to the General Punctuation section to find and click your chosen dash
• Method B:
- Hold Alt and type 0151 on your number pad (if present), then release Alt
• Method C:
- In Microsoft Word, type a word followed by two hyphens (with no spaces) and then the next word; Word will instantly merge the two hyphens into an em-dash
• Method D:
1) Click the Start menu, search for and then open Character Map
2) Scroll to find your chosen dash type and click it, then use “Select” to select it
3) Click “Copy” to copy it to your clipboard and make it available to paste in wherever you wish to type your dash by using Ctrl+V together.
On iOS Devices:
1. Tap the 123 button to open the numbers and symbols keyboard
2. Hold down the Minus/Hyphen key to see your dash choices
3. Slide your finger to your desired dash and release
On Android Devices:
1) Tap the ?123 (or !#1) button to open the numbers and symbols keyboard
2) Hold down the Minus/Hyphen key to see your dash choices
3) Slide your finger to your desired dash and release
The Conclusion:
In summary, no, using an em-dash is absolutely not a sign of AI-writing, and humans have been using them for hundreds of years — long before the advent of AI and its associated “slop”. Throughout this blog post, I’ve made use of the em-dash in multiple sentences, and I hope this illustrates to you some of the ways in which you could utilise it as well.
So the next time someone accuses you of using AI to write for you, educate them, and in time, the controversy will die down, and writers can get back to doing what makes us human — being creative and telling stories — without fear of judgement. I’m personally proud to use the em-dash and I’m not going to stop doing so just because some ignorant stranger on the web thinks I rely on a bot to write for me; this says more about that person’s language and literacy skills than mine.
Now go forth, plan, plot, outline, draft, write and publish safe in the knowledge that the em-dash is not some AI phenomenon and that it’s here to stay! It was here before AI and it will be here long after Skynet has been defeated by the Terminator.
Have fun writing this week, and I’ll see you next week for another blog post!
