I first became acquainted with the em-dash somewhere in the mid-90s.

I was a journalism major and my advisor/instructor, the esteemed Bob Watkins, was the one who first introduced me to them. Once one sees them in use, one realizes how powerful they are. Like any art form, the artist has numerous tools at their disposal to craft their works: paintbrushes, paints, palettes, scrapers, chisels, lenses. A writer is not much different. There are various ways to offer parenthetical thoughts or asides. Take the most common one, the comma. Or maybe actual parentheses. Semicolons are like the AMC Gremlin of the punctuation world; sometimes they come in handy, but mostly they are awkward and off-putting. Some people even lean on square brackets. Why? No idea. Or, there is the often-abused...stream-of-consciousness...patchwork of...multiple...ellipsis.

Oh, how I wish AI chose to abuse that one instead.

Don't get me wrong, I use ellipses often in dialog, and sometimes for a dramatic conclusion to a sentence. It conveys thought and contemplation, or a character choosing their words carefully.

But the regal em-dash? It's a different beast. Elegant, visually clean, less of a trailing off and more of a context-builder. Once you learn the keyboard shortcut, it's game on.

Now, before AI hit the scene, I will fully admit that I often abused the em-dash. If there is one positive about the AI em-dashpocalypse, it's that it has forced me to be more judicious about how frequently I use them. And I suppose that is healthy.

And then ChatGPT started to scrape everything. It soaked up the written world, a typographical bacteria consuming any block of text with or without an ascender or descender. It assembled it all into patterns, language models, expected best practices. Within that, it decided that em-dashes are the shit. And who can blame it?

Unfortunately, that has caused writers of all sorts who leaned on em-dashes to suddenly question whether they can use them without being accused of using AI to write. Someone who may not have noticed em-dashes before may see them and instantly declare with an angry finger jab, "IT'S AI! YOU ARE HEREFORTH CANCELLED, YOU CHARLATAN!" The fear is real, especially considering the very flawed state of AI detection software, which is frequently (like much more often than not) is completely wrong in its assessments of writing.

And I, too, have even done this second-guessing in my own writing as of late. "Do I really need this em-dash here? How about a nice, tame comma set instead?" And you know what? Sometimes the em-dash is really the only option.

I think back to my aforementioned adviser, Bob Watkins, and I could just see a modern me lamenting to him that I can't use the em-dash anymore because AI is dumb. I could just see him grimace, roll his eyes, and say:

Just use the fucking em-dash, Bret.

AI be damned.

So it is with this long preamble that I want to declare:

I do not use AI to write any of the content on this blog. Or my books. Or my other writings. My em-dashes are mine and mine alone.

In fact, I would like to propose that we em-dash users should wage a wholesale war on the flagrant AI em-dash misappropriation. Reclaim the em-dash! Use it with pride, and when people tell you you're AI, just smile and tell them:

"It's not AI—it's anti-AI."

And then keep shamelessly using that em-dash. Because you've earned it, my friend.