When Writers Start Avoiding Good Writing

Somewhere along the way, the em dash became suspicious.

Not misused. Not overused.

But suspicious.

Apparently, if you use an em dash, you must be using ChatGPT. Or some other AI tool. Or at the very least, you must have “AI vibes.”

That’s the conventional wisdom floating around online right now.

And it’s ridiculous.

I Checked the Receipts

When I first started hearing this, I did what any slightly annoyed, mildly stubborn law professor would do. I went back and looked at my old writing. Blog posts. Articles. Emails. Notes. Stuff I wrote long before generative AI was mainstream.

And I didn’t just glance at a few examples. I went all the way back to my master’s thesis from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1996, titled For God, For Country, and For The Yale Daily News.

Then I did something a little ridiculous—but also a little satisfying.

I counted the em dashes.

The result? An average of almost 1.5 em dashes per page throughout my 1996 master's thesis. And this was written decades before anyone had heard of ChatGPT.

So, I’ve just always liked using them.

What Is an Em Dash, Anyway?

An em dash—like this one—is a punctuation mark used to create emphasis, insert an aside, or shift direction within a sentence.

Writers use em dashes because they create rhythm. They create emphasis. They allow for interruption without clunkiness. They let you pivot mid-sentence in a way that commas sometimes can’t and periods shouldn’t.

That was true decades ago. It’s still true now.

The em dash didn’t suddenly appear in people’s writing in 2023.

The Myth of the “AI Tell”

The idea that em dashes are an AI tell misunderstands two things.

First, em dashes have been used by serious writers for centuries. Journalists use them. Novelists use them. Legal scholars use them. Professors use them. Bloggers use them. They’re not a new invention.

Second, AI models learned from existing writing. They didn’t invent em dashes. They picked up patterns that were already common in published prose. If em dashes show up in AI-generated writing, that’s because they show up in human writing.

Blaming the punctuation is like blaming the outline structure of an essay. If something is clear, organized, and flows well, that doesn’t mean a machine wrote it. It might just mean the writer knows what they’re doing.

Here’s the part that bothers me most.

I’ve caught myself avoiding em dashes on purpose. Not because they’re unclear. Not because they’re excessive. Not because they weaken the sentence.

But because I don’t want someone to say, “That sounds like AI.”

Think about that for a second: I’m changing my writing style not to improve clarity, not to enhance persuasion, not to sharpen my voice, but to avoid suspicion.

That’s backwards.

When writers start writing to avoid accusations instead of writing to communicate, quality suffers. Sentences become flatter. Transitions become clunkier. Voice gets muted. Precision gets sacrificed.

In an effort to look “more human,” we end up writing in a more constrained, less expressive way.

That isn’t progress.

This Feels Familiar

As a law professor, this whole dynamic reminds me of something else.

Sometimes students write a well-organized essay using a clean CREAC structure. The rule is clearly stated. The explanation is tight. The application is disciplined. The conclusion is direct.

And someone will say, “That seems too polished.”

Too polished?

No. It’s just structured.

We’d never tell students to avoid clarity because it looks suspicious. We’d never say, “Maybe make your analysis messier so it seems more authentic.”

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening with writing style right now. People are encouraging writers to dull their prose to avoid being mistaken for a machine.

Good Writing Didn’t Become Illegal

The em dash is a tool. Like a highlighter. Like a heading. Like a transition phrase.

Tools aren’t the problem. Misuse is the problem.

If someone writes an entire article filled with unnecessary interruptions and dramatic pauses, that’s a stylistic issue. But that was a stylistic issue long before AI existed.

We should evaluate writing the way we always have. Does it communicate clearly? Does it fit the audience? Does it advance the argument? Does it sound like the writer?

Those are the right questions.

“Does it contain an em dash?” isn’t one of them.

What Actually Makes Writing Sound Human

If you’re worried about your writing sounding like AI, here’s a better checklist.

Specificity. Concrete examples. Personal experience. Imperfection. Judgment. Voice.

Machines can generate structure. They struggle with lived context. They struggle with the subtle judgment that comes from years of practice. They struggle with the small, idiosyncratic details that make writing unmistakably yours.

If your writing includes your stories, your analogies, your opinions, your perspective, it won’t be mistaken for generic output. And if someone still thinks it is, that says more about their heuristic than your prose.

I’m not going to intentionally make my writing worse to satisfy a social media myth. I’m not going to strip out a punctuation mark that improves clarity and rhythm just because someone labeled it “AI-coded.”

The em dash didn’t write this article—I did.

And I’ll keep using whatever tools help me say what I mean, the way I mean to say it.

Because good writing isn’t suspicious.

It’s just good writing.