AI's frequent use of em dashes is changing how people write. Many now avoid these punctuation marks to sound more human and less robotic. This trend highlights a new anxiety around writing, as perfect ...

AI models follow certain structural rules when generating text. This can make it easier to identify their writing. They tend towards contrasts, for example: "It's not X -- it's Y." The past few years ...

It’s rare that a punctuation mark becomes grist for the online rumor mill. But recently, an uptick in focus on AI and its impacts has brought a Blake Lively-esque level of attention to the em dash, ...

The em dash has long been a favorite punctuation mark of writers everywhere. This lengthier dash can replace a comma or a colon. It’s also sometimes used to sum up info at the end of the sentence, to ...

Theo W. Tobel ’27 — a Crimson Editorial editor — is a Philosophy and Neuroscience concentrator in Dunster House. But there is something far worse that LLMs are doing: They are taking away the em dash ...

I’ve been teaching English for more than twenty years, long enough to watch punctuation trends come and go like fashion. The Oxford comma had its civil war. The semicolon had its fall from grace. But ...