Em dashes are to AIR MAIL what Vesper martinis are to James Bond—our signature. So you can only imagine how our editors were feeling—shaken and stirred, that is—when they learned their punctuation mark of choice has not only been bastardized by villainous L.L.M.’s like ChatGPT and Claude but had also become a “GPT-ism,” or an obvious tell for machine-generated text.
The em dash comes with a very particular set of rules: it can function like a comma, a colon, or a parenthesis, but never like a hyphen, which joins separate words to create a compound. Brits leave a space on either side of an em dash, while Americans—who love to change British rules—don’t.
But now, the only rule concerning the em dash seems to be to not use it at all—so much so that AIR MAIL contributor Carrie Monahan, who works with high-schoolers on their college essays, says her students are “terrified” of using the em dash. “They’re scared admissions committees will accuse them of using A.I.” Even Casey Lewis, the author of the popular After School Substack, provides a disclaimer at the end of her columns: “All em dashes are not GPT-generated, just millennial-coded.”
So what is to be the fate of the punctuation mark ubiquitous in both Joyce’s Ulysses and Diana Vreeland’s memos? Must we stoop to the clunky comma or, God forbid, the unsightly parenthetical? Or do we stick by the em dash in the hopes of one day triumphing over the creations of Sam Altman and his ilk, in an epic battle not seen since that of David and Goliath? We asked journalists, screenwriters, novelists, and everyone in between to give us their thoughts on the biggest grammatical controversy since the Oxford comma.
THE CRUSADERS
Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers: “The em dash rules, and I will never stop using it. Unlike the semicolon, it tells your reader, ‘I enjoy writing—but I’m not a dick about it.’”
Lynn Nesbit, literary agent: “The em dash has held on in casual prose through many eras. Doubt even A.I. can kill it!”
Monica Lewinsky, anti-bullying activist: “#TeamEmDash.”
Jon Hamm, star of HBO’s Mad Men: “I love the em dash (I call it the double dash from my days of typing school), and I will use it until I die, as well as two spaces after a period and other things drummed into me by Strunk and White [William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, authors of The Elements of Style]. I’m not a boomer, but I’m sure this will elicit an ‘O.K., boomer’ or two. To that I say, ‘Six seven.’”
Ottessa Moshfegh, author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation: “No dash could ever be passé … I still don’t know how to produce the em dash in Microsoft Word, so I just do a double en dash and let the copy editor fix it for me. But I quite like the ‘--’ because it’s like someone clearing their throat for an aside. ‘Uh hem.’ I love to talk about punctuation, and I never want to talk about A.I.!”
Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids: “I use the em dash a lot, and now everyone thinks I’m not writing what I write. It’s just another reason to hate A.I., the technology nobody but rich guys who want to save money on their workforce asked for.”
Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women: “The em dash appears in my novel, Animal, as a surrogate for quotation marks—those weary wiggles whose very manifestation is so aesthetically uninspired that seeing them in my own work makes me feel as though I’ve let the characters down, by drawing silly mustaches across their vital thoughts. Hence, we humans should take the em dash back, using it weirdly and proudly and not as A.I. does—in times when better, more human writers know to use the perfectly present comma.”
Lili Anolik, author of Didion & Babitz: “Asking a writer to give up the em dash is like asking a carpenter to give up the screwdriver. The em dash is in the toolbox. Why should I fork it over? I don’t care if A.I. has put a stink on it. NO—like, absolutely not. The em dash stays.”
Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: “Of all the forms of punctuation that would become an A.I. staple, I didn’t see the em dash coming. I would have bet on the semicolon. But the em dash has always been a bit jaunty, fun, even reckless, and I urge human writers not to forsake it. Tom Wolfe brought it to its apex—that’s where I learned it!—so it can’t be abandoned.”
Steven Chaiken, literary agent: “I use them indiscriminately! Can’t get enough. By far the chic-est punctuation there is—leaves you wanting more. People are constantly telling me to cool it with all of the em dashes, but I won’t.”
Christian Lorentzen, author of the Substack Christian Lorentzen’s Diary: “If the fashion among robots were for hyphens, I would welcome the excuse to ditch those unsightly adjective-yokes, which seem to intrude whenever the parts of speech undergo an identity crisis. But the long elegant lines that signal a temporary hiatus make every page more exciting. Living writers shouldn’t worry about the new robots or about each other. The real competition is all our dead heroes. Our job is to do our best with everything they left us.”
Molly Jong-Fast, political commentator: “I have a hyphen in my name, so I’m a fan.”
Shawn McCreesh, New York Times White House correspondent: “I love the em dash. I’m not surprised the machines do, too. I should definitely not be using my time right now to explain why I love this punctuation mark—I’m on deadline for a story about something crazy Trump just did, though I have no good ideas for a lede, so this is what I’m doing instead—but I do feel strongly about this subject.”
Bob Colacello, Vanity Fair contributor: “I love em dashes! Great way to separate phrases so they stand out, whether in the middle of a sentence or at the end. Often better than the semicolon, less formal, cleaner. Down with A.I.! Long live the em dash!”
THE WEARY
Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short: “Still love the em dash. But I no longer say, ‘That’s a great question!’”
Lena Dunham, creator and star of HBO’s Girls: “As someone long committed to the em dash, I feel I must now be incredibly precise with usage. I have noticed that A.I. prefers a long, sensual em dash, so even though it’s technically incorrect, I go with the shorter hyphen (-). Like fingerprints on pottery, it shows a human was there!”
Emily Sundberg, author of the Substack FeedMe: “I think if you pass off A.I. writing as your own, that’s between you and God. What happens around the em dashes is more of a tell than an em dash itself. It’s not an immediate flag to me.”
Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection and winner of the AIR MAIL Tom Wolfe Prize for Fiction: “The em dash is generally less used in Italian (I love it, though! Just as I love exclamation marks!), and A.I. systems are usually trained in English, so it’s temporarily less of an impending threat in other languages.”
THE AGNOSTIC
Richard Osman, author of The Thursday Murder Club: “I feel like an indulgent Victorian prince if I use so much as a semicolon.”
Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight’s Children: “I have no view about this admittedly important matter.”
Griffin Dunne, director of Practical Magic: “I regard the em dash as the fourth lead in punctuation starring the colon, co-starring the semicolon, then supported by the ever dependable comma. The em dash doesn’t have the gravitas of the colon or the grace of a comma, but it can introduce a fact in the middle of a sentence and let the thought continue on its way to the period.”
Sofia Coppola, director of Lost in Translation: “Personally I don’t use a dash so much, I use a lot of commas and tend toward run-on (oh, there it is) sentences!”
Will Arnett, host of SmartLess: “[The em dash] is the poor man’s ellipsis … ”
Mollie Glick, literary agent: “Farewell, old friend. You will be missed—though, to be honest, I have always rather preferred an ellipsis.”
Emma Cline, author of The Guest: “It’s not keeping me up at night.”
THE CONFOUNDED
Judd Apatow, director and writer of The 40-Year-Old Virgin: “I use the em dash often because I do not understand the rules of grammar, so if A.I. is using it a lot, it just makes me think that A.I. is dumb and will eventually get insecure about humans and shut off our water supply.”
Rich Appel, Family Guy show-runner: “Thanks to Air Mail, I’ve just learned that something I’ve long loved—the em dash—is called “the em dash.”
THE COPY EDITOR
Adam Nadler, AIR MAIL copy editor: “I often find my job comes down to the Goldilocks Rule: Not too little, not too much. So it goes with the em dash. Avoid it entirely and you lose the easy, conversational asides it makes possible. Sprinkle them in like my grandmother with a salt shaker and—let’s face it—you end up—God forbid—ruining the—proverbial!—broth. But strike the right balance and you can avoid the dead stop of parentheses, sidestep the cold formality of semicolons, and make your writing feel ‘just right’—and isn’t that what Goldilocks would want?”
Carolina de Armas is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
