Em dashes are fucking amazing

An ode to a punctuation mark

I fucking love em dashes. I spam them all the time. They make me feel free.

I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

I fucking love em dashes. There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum — but in the same sentence, not a new one — and, guess what, the em dash is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together — and the em dash lets you do exactly this. Em dashes make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.

Em dashes can be used instead of brackets in a sentence — like this one for example — and you can just type your shit and keep going. Brackets are for people who raise their hand in meetings and say: “this might be a stupid question”. A parenthetical is whispering: “Sorry, don’t mind me, I’ll be quick”. Em dash kicks the door open and announces itself. Use brackets when you are embarrassed by your own thought.

And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause. Punctuation marks originally evolved as pause or breathing markers, after all. It’s not like grammar and punctuation rules were sent to us by god in their final form. People were just writing shit, and at some point the most popular patterns got codified. Sure, you need commas to signify a small break. Then em dash is a natural way to express a larger, longer, break. A period is great to express a complete thought — and it shifts the register of the next letter.

But colons are so nearly useless — they are the same width as a comma and unlike periods they don’t change the register of the following letter. Em dashes are of a clearly different length. And most colons are better off as em dashes to delineate different parts of the sentence.

As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together. I am always happy when I find a place for the little guy semicolon. But, again, most cases where you could use one are better off served by the em dash as well.

Speaking of ellipsis… Ellipsis is a tad too melancholic. It’s nice, it’s fine, it’s like being in a garden and having limerence about a woman you can’t have. If you have a text where this is appropriate — by all means use ellipsis. I usually want to take my readers to the highest highs instead of idly sitting around with them. And em dashes are like a lift to the top floor of a high-rise hotel building in Tokyo — an one that takes you there in seconds. The ellipsis trails off while em the em dash cuts forward.

“But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes? Fine, you do, okay, fair enough. Then I’ve got you covered: use AP-style em dashes, these are separated from the text by spaces instead of being glued to it. That’s how every em dash in this piece is styled — and it’s unlike AI em dashes which are “like—this, word—word”. You can now outnitpick your hostile interlocutor by explaining that you’re using the special sort of em dashes AI doesn’t produce by default.

But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think? Are you really that easily swayed by a rando’s opinion? You know what, we can play this game the other way. If your writing doesn’t contain an em dash, I ain’t reading it. From now on you are obliged to use em dashes for my pleasure.

PS: if you want personalised advice from me on how to use punctuation correctly, you can now get it for $175/hour.