Leave the precious em dash alone

I totally had my mind set on breaking my post streak today. And then, I happened to stumble onto yet another blog post — yes, another one — about the glorious em dash!

Arrrggghhh!

AI is not writing this! I challenge you — if you think it is — to point me to a LLM who can write as badly as I can and I’ll give you a fortune in cash.

Move on, people. AI was likely trained on the writings of professionals who know when — and how — to utilise the punctuation. It is therefore writing correctly.

I also know how to punctuate correctly (mostly), having learned at school that besides inserting this mark to demonstrate a cut-off or interruption in speech, it can also be used in place of ( ) to denote a similar sentence break, as demonstrated above, in paragraphs #1, #3 and #4.

So, can whoever started this silly idea that the useful em dash is an indicator of AI-generated text kindly retract it? “Or else I might just have to threaten to kick you in the a—”.

See what I did there? Thanks, I’m here all week.

My keyboard does not have this character, so I use Ctrl+Shift+U 2014 <Enter> and bang! We have the “long hyphen”, em dash, “long minus sign”, whateveryoucallit. The long dash. Not my fault you don’t know how to make this!

I love it, leave it alone, leave me alone to play finger stretch gymnastics on my noisy keyboard.

And if you still can’t tell, THIS is definitely not AI generated.