From the field notes
Why the hate on the em dash?
I’ve been thinking about em dashes for a while. Then I watched a video where the host got to Matt Pocock’s Grill Me skill and stopped to count the dashes. Suddenly the skill was being judged by how many em dashes it had.
The host tried the skill anyway. I kept thinking about the dashes.
I’ve always liked getting the little things right when I write. Smart Quotes for Smart People (opens in a new tab) got me into curly quotes and apostrophes. I also kept a reference handy when I needed to decide which dash to use.1 A hyphen joins the words in “cross-browser,” an en dash marks a range like “200–500,” and an em dash lets me interrupt myself mid-sentence—which comes in handy. You see what I did there?
I was already using em dashes on this blog in 2014, back when I was writing about LocalStorage security and quota errors.
Now that LLMs have picked up the habit too, a dash I put there on purpose can make a sentence look machine-written. Apparently I’m supposed to tell my writing agent to make a worse punctuation choice so it’ll sound dumb, like humans. Awkward!
Still, I get where the advice comes from. Any stylistic device gets tiresome with repetition. If every other sentence has an aside, I start to lose track of what the paragraph was about. Sometimes a comma will do. Sometimes the aside is the interesting part and deserves a sentence of its own.
If an em dash makes the sentence easier to read, it’s earned its place. Deleting it on sight is the lazy edit.