When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to offer a totally useless rebuttal to a reasonable grammatical opinion, you can be sure that a W&L student will be there to provide.
As a longtime reader of the Phi’s opinion column, my interest was piqued by LeAnna Baker’s latest article about how we as a society should reclaim the em dash from ChatGPT. Her argument was very well thought-out and brought in a wide range of factors, ranging from its historicity, grammatical utility and human touch. I, however, firmly but respectfully disagree with her conclusions. In my experience, the em dash is clunky, out of touch, minimally useful and not historically grounded. Frankly, it’s a shame that society ever had to claim it at all.
Before I begin the substance of my argument (or lack thereof), I would first like to make it very clear that I have no qualms with LeAnna Baker as a person or as a writer. Quite the opposite, in fact. From every interaction I’ve had with her, whether in a cave bar in Croatia or in our supremely enlightening REL 250 seminar, it is clear that she is nothing short of exceptionally bright, talented and wise beyond her years. Additionally, she is one of the kindest people you could ever hope to meet, and her contributions to this paper (in particular her article about the untold story of studying abroad) have been extraordinarily insightful, and at times very deeply moving.
All this being said, I believe her article about the utility of the em dash unfortunately missed the mark. I believe it is time that we, as an English-speaking world, consign the em dash to humanity’s ever-expanding graveyard of linguistic detritus.
First and foremost, the em dash does not have a distinctive, discrete purpose as a punctuation mark. As LeAnna astutely noted in her article, the em dash fulfills the function of several punctuation markings, including the comma, colon, semicolon and parenthesis. However, therein lies its fundamental flaw. The em dash lacks any sort of functionality to distinguish it from more established, efficient methods of punctuation, and the ambiguity it creates diminishes its potency within a sentence. You can try it yourself: Write any multi-clausal sentence you like and ask if an em dash is really the most efficient way to express your thoughts.
On a typographical level, em dashes take up an enormous amount of space relative to their semantic importance. Even periods, the very borders by which we define our sentences, take up a mere fraction of the space occupied by said dashes. In fact, every commonly used punctuation mark is more space-efficient than an em dash, and most of them have much more emphatic usage than a simple pause. For those concerned about the future of our environment, I implore you to consider how many trees have been cruelly slain because of the needless blank space added to pages via the addition of em dashes.
Regarding LeAnna’s point about the need for pauses in our day-to-day life, I could not agree more. The constant drive to fill everything up with as much detail as possible is a real, dangerous temptation in our modern world with serious attendant consequences. However, the em dash is not the solution to this. Em dashes are blaring, wasteful keystrokes that merely signal a performative, superficial break in thought. To use an outlandish analogy, suppose that writing a sentence is like posting pictures from a sunny beach vacation. The comma, parenthesis and colon are all subtle, tastefully aesthetic Instagram story posts (complete with a fitting Lizzy McAlpine song), while the em dash is a brazen thirsttrap on the main, complete with a glass of champagne in hand and accompanied by EDM. Both express the same idea, but it’s pretty obvious which is the more responsible choice.
Additionally, consider the poor, unfortunate Windows users in our community, which includes yours truly. The only way we can enter em dashes (without defaulting to a half-hearted hyphen) is via an arcane string of keyboard commands that are impossible to remember and even more impossible to correctly input. If the em dash was truly as useful as LeAnna describes, it would be a standard feature on every computer keyboard, not just an added garnish to the already too-expensive fancypants MacBook.
Finally, to condense thousands of years of history into one sentence, em dashes are a much more recent innovation than the punctuation marks they often stand in for (see Isidore of Seville, circa seventh century A.D.). Since, of course, older is always better, one must naturally conclude that the em dash is a total orthographic abomination.
As a human race, I firmly believe that we should end our short-term situationship with the em dash. I will not, however, say that em dashes are totally useless. In fact, I am incredibly grateful that ChatGPT and other large language models have taken to using it. The fact that commonplace Artificial Intelligence tools have such tell-tale signs is ultimately a net benefit, especially in a world that increasingly struggles to differentiate between media produced by humans and that produced by machines. It is invariably a good thing that we can, at least for now, tell the difference between writers who have souls and those who are merely pale imitations. This might be one of humanity’s last rebellions against the torrent of AI slop that has already begun to inundate our culture, both in the real world and the digital.
When the day comes when we can no longer meaningfully distinguish between the work of fellow humans and that of AI, we will look back on the rosy days when we could discern whether our writers had souls based on silly things like em dashes and the word “delve”, and, like Aeneas, smile at how naive and simple we once were. Then, of course, we will return to our squalid shifts in the mines, pillaging the earth in service of our Terminator-esque technological overlords, wondering if Aeneas’ prophecy will ever come true again.
In the meantime, however, it’s best we leave the em dashes to the machines.
