ChatGPT, crisis of em dash, and please leave our beloved punctuation alone

India Today

4 days ago

Almost two decades ago in The Statesman newsroom — this was when I started my training in page-making in QuarkXPress — one of the first things I learnt was ALT + 0151. Soon, mashing together ALT + 0151 in a quick and fluid moment became second nature while typing. This was the key combination that we would input subconsciously while going through news copies — of course, after placing them inside the mighty Quark with which we spent our evenings. A quick ALT + 0151 and each time it would replace with em dash, that puny mark which reporters used to write in a hurry.advertisementI stopped making pages around 15 years ago after I switched from desk work to full-time writing and reporting. But em dash has stayed with me all this while. It is one mark that I love, largely because it is — along with the comma — the mightiest and most versatile punctuation mark. And while it has its share of problems like any other punctuation mark, for people who are in the business of writing, it is a scalpel and an axe at the same time. It can be utilitarian, like in a news copy, or it can be used to make words sing in a book like Ulysses.Now in 2025, I am rethinking. For years, I encouraged writers in my team to use em dash because of its ability to organise information neatly. In 2025, I sometimes ask them to remove it from their pieces. I know I should not and yet I do. Thank you, ChatGPT! Or not.
Yes, it is all because of ChatGPT and that crazy beast called popular taste. Many among you dear readers, many among you, will read the first two paragraphs of this piece and immediately think that it has been written by ChatGPT. Because somewhere you have read, or someone has told you, or maybe you have seen some X thread called How To Identify ChatGPT Writing, explaining that one tell-tale sign of AI writing is em dash. It is not without logic. ChatGPT and other AI tools do use em dash liberally. But what is not right is that just because an AI tool loves a punctuation mark, we are being forced to discard it.There is a reason. ChatGPT loves em dash because writers love it. Em dash is not a punctuation mark like semicolon, a reviled and pretentious sign that is neither here nor there. Semicolon deserves its ignominy. Samuel Beckett hated it so much that in his novel Watt, he ended up writing, 'how hideous is the semicolon.' And Kurt Vonnegut famously called it 'transvestite hermaphrodites' in an era when politically incorrect things could be said without a lynch-mob forming outside one's house. Vonnegut was clear: no semicolons. 'Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. All they do is show you've been to college,' he once said.advertisementYes, semicolon deserves all the hate. But not em dash. Because em dash, along with comma, represents how we think. And how we think is how we write.In our regular conversations, such as when everyone is sharing gossip during dinner, we talk linearly. This means one word leads to another, one thought leads to the next, and there is a thread running through them. But writing is different. Writing is not speaking. Instead, writing is a far truer reflection of thinking. And when it comes to thoughts, it is easy to notice that our thoughts are not linear. Instead, thoughts are haphazard, and every time you think about how sweet mangoes are, you are also probably thinking that similarly sweet are melons.Writers love em dash because it can be used in tens of different ways to organise haphazard thoughts. It can be used to branch out to a new tangent — and how lovely that is, like wishfully thinking of sun on a rainy day — while staying the course. It can be used to connect two bits in a statement — join them together so they seem whole. It can be used to put emphasis on something — and think about this deeply — because it is an important point. It can be used to end a sentence with some force — stop. Its versatile nature makes em dash a favourite of writers.advertisementThis is also why ChatGPT — and other AI tools — learnt to use it. Various AI models have been trained in high-quality writing. Just a few weeks ago, we got reports that Anthropic bought millions of books and scanned them to train its Claude AI. The case is similar for ChatGPT and Gemini, or DeepSeek. You can say that AI has learnt writing from people like Hemingway and Joyse and Nabokov, the writers who used to love em dash.Given that AI has been trained more on writing, and less on speech, it uses punctuation that may seem out of place in 2025. We live in a time of podcasts and short videos and text messaging, a time when reading and writing are considered pretentious activities, when vocab of an average person is considered outsized if it has the word 'delve' in it. In this time, something like em dash may come across as a mark of artificiality even when it is not.advertisementPunctuation is a tricky subject. Rules exist, and more so in India, where we place our Wren & Martin on the same shelves where we keep our holy books, but in reality, these rules are extremely flexible. Their only task is to bring clarity and meaning to words. It doesn't matter in what manner they do it. This is the reason why Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison struggled with her editor on commas. Her idea was that a comma is not for grammar, a thought that apparently did not sit well with her editor. 'He does not understand that commas are for pauses and breath. He thinks commas are for grammatical things. We have come to an understanding, but it is still a fight,' Morrison once famously said. It is also the reason why Gertrude Stein, who too disliked commas, wrote sentences such as 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.'Writing is this complex, beautiful, shape-shifting thing. It slithers and simmers and, in the hands of good writers, it rarely follows, ahem, a script. But as AI takes over, there is a great rush to create new rules that can distinguish between AI writing and the words that humans have put together. The task is futile. Good writing is going to be good writing. And the marker for that goodness needs to be decided by merit and taste, and not on the basis of how many times em dash and the word 'delve' have been used in it.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Trending Reel