When it comes to writing, few punctuation marks carry as much weight as the humble em dash. This versatile mark adds drama, emphasis, and a touch of sophistication to our prose, but can also be a crutch for lazy writing.
For writers who rely heavily on em dashes, the question on everyone's mind is: does it make us sound like AI? The answer, it turns out, is a resounding yes – but not for the reasons you might think.
One writer decided to put their em dash obsession to the test, feeding 10 recent articles into the Claude Sonnet 4.6 tool and asking for a ranked list of their most AI-like quirks. The results were enlightening, and not what they expected.
According to the analysis, the writer's number-one Achilles' heel was not, in fact, their overuse of em dashes, but rather their reliance on parenthetical asides. With 67 instances in just 11,700 words, this habit reads like AI hedging its bets – a pattern that human writers rarely exhibit.
Em dashes, while still a close second, were found to be less of a problem. The writer's use of 78 instances – roughly one every 150 words – was deemed excessive, but not necessarily a hallmark of AI writing.
The rest of the list revealed some interesting insights, including a tendency towards long sentences (21% exceeded 35 words), filler hedges like "actually" and "rather," and generic intensifiers like "very." But despite these quirks, the writer's writing was ultimately deemed to sound human – a ranking of just 3 out of 10 on the "sounds like AI" meter.
The analysis praised the writer's strong vocabulary, varied sentence starters, and commitment to opinions, suggesting that their writing reads more like that of a journalist who edits quickly rather than an AI.
The writer is taking the critique to heart, vowing to use em dashes more sparingly and pare down their parentheticals. It's a promise that's not just wishful thinking – it's a commitment to refining their craft and avoiding the pitfalls of AI-like writing.
