If I was alive during the Industrial Revolution, I would probably have been a Luddite. Not just because of the Horrible Histories song, though that does make it appealing, but because it seems I am not one to fully embrace technological innovation. For one thing, I am sick of AI.

Maybe I’m one of those people Abril Duarte González writes about who is resistant to change. I admit, there is a certain appeal of returning to quill and candlelight. But that is obviously impractical and, like electricity, AI is here to stay. I’m not here to regurgitate the age-old debates, but I am throwing my hat into the ring on one thing. And that’s punctuation.

I don’t know much about a lot of things, but I feel like I have a pretty strong grasp of SPAG. This is a girl who would sing the ‘Punctuation Jive’ instead of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ as a child. Yes, AI threatens to take a lot away from us (art, originality, critical thinking), but you know what? Long may it continue. So long as I get to keep my precious piece of punctuation, I’ll accept AI-generated wedding vows.

“The em dash should not be in the hands of select scholarly circles, but understood and used by everyone”

The worst thing to come out of the AI revolution is the besmirching of the em dash’s reputation. Look at her—isn’t she beautiful? So misunderstood as she connects my explanatory phrase. ChatGPT has dug its claws into her and now she’s been thrown into keyboard prison, never to be option + shift + hyphenated into existence ever again. Not on my watch.

The em dash, a punctuation mark that derives its name from its similar width to the letter ‘m’, has become a telltale sign of AI usage. Students worry that if they were to join me on team em dash, their reputation would be tarnished. “This isn’t creativity, it’s artificiality” your DoS might cry. What if you have to go to a viva voce and defend your em dash ridden piece of genius to a board of scary academics? It’s safer to backspace it away rather than allow for any seeds of doubt to grow.

But we need the em dash. It’s not there to look pretty, it has a function. The way we write tends to reflect the way we think. And we don’t usually think in perfect full sentences. We think messily, we interrupt ourselves—we go back to an earlier point; we add something, we counter it (or back it up). That is what punctuation is for and why we are taught to use it in the first place. We could all write like this: here is my point. Here is another. And another. But there’s a reason why primary school wanted us to go a bit further than “I went to the shop”. You end up sounding more robotic than AI itself.

“I will merrily continue to use the em dash, just like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen did before me”

And there’s a reason why these large language models don’t write like that either. It’s because they learn from us. LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, pick your poison) have been trained by human writing and high-quality writing at that. Journalists, academics, and authors have all have historically used em dashes. This is because of their versatility; em dashes link clauses, replace commas and often aid the readability of a text. As they are everywhere in the training data, they are littered in the response to your prompt. That’s not the em dash’s fault so much as it is the humans who trained the models—and stole from other human writers to do so. Allegedly.

I will give AI its kudos: I have met many people who did not know what the em dash was until its ChatGPTification. There is a part of me that celebrates a machine that is bringing useful punctuation to public attention. The em dash should not be in the hands of select scholarly circles, but understood and used by everyone. That speaks to a wider point about AI more broadly: knowledge should not be gatekept, and AI is one way of making it more accessible.

Now I’m not saying we go crazy and use the em dash in every other sentence. Anyone who has ever had me as an editor knows I don’t love the overuse of dashes, and you can always have too much of something good. That’s why the em dash has become synonymous with AI in the first place: it hasn’t been taught about its grammatical limits. But why I’m advocating for keeping the em dash, even in the face of potential academic suspicion, is because I don’t think we should let AI change us.

AI should be an aid, not a dictator. Humans should not be changing the way they write, or think, or talk because of these machines. If I want to use an em dash, I should not be worried about my entire intellectual capability being questioned because of some guy in Silicon Valley. We should refuse to make adjustments and be scared into semicolon submission. Instead, we should keep to our personal styles because that is precisely what creativity is. Using the em dash, to me anyway, is a small act of defiance. Not just against AI itself, but the academics who question my work purely because of its presence.

AI is already taking away jobs and threatening many academic fields. Now it’s coming for my grammar? Absolutely not. I will merrily continue to use the em dash, just like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen did before me, and will happily attest for my research and writing’s merit (or lack thereof) if the need arises. I hope you will join me on the reclamation of the em dash—before it’s too late.