Photo credit: Maya Hernández

The em dash is dead — or at least it feels that way.

When I was studying for the SAT, I fell in love with it. Every passage seemed to have one: this long, beautiful line that split a thought open and let something unexpected slip in. It wasn’t a period, too final, or a comma, too flimsy. And it was undoubtedly better than parentheses, which felt like an afterthought. The em dash carried weight, drama and honesty. It was punctuation that said, clear the space and make room for what really matters.

Now, whenever I reach for it, I freeze. Artificial intelligence churns out pages littered with em dashes, more than any human would use. It’s become a signature of machine-written text, a dead giveaway that the words might not be your own. And because of that, something I loved feels ruined.

I don’t blame the punctuation itself. It didn’t ask to be hijacked by algorithms. But, I do blame the way we’ve started to see it. Instead of a tool, it’s become a red flag. If I put too many em dashes in an essay, I worry people will assume I didn’t write it and that my voice isn’t mine.

It’s strange to think a piece of punctuation could die, but I really do feel like we’re at its funeral. People strip it out of emails, and swap it out in drafts. Even my own fingers hesitate before typing it, like I’m betraying my credibility by pressing “option + shift + dash.”

The irony? AI didn’t invent the em dash. Writers did. It has history, elegance and humanity woven into its very length. To let it disappear just because machines overuse it feels like surrendering part of our voice.

The em dash isn’t dead; it’s just being misused. If AI wants to flood its paragraphs with them, let it. But that doesn’t mean we have to give it up. To abandon the em dash out of fear would be allowing a machine to dictate how we write, and that’s the one thing writing should never be. I’ll keep using it — boldly, unapologetically — because only humans can give it meaning.