Latest news with #punctuation
Mail & Guardian
30-07-2025
- Mail & Guardian
AI didn't kill writing — we did
(Graphic: John McCann/M&G) Being a grammar snob is so 2012 but I'm probably not alone in this one. Seeing the em dash (—) go mainstream wasn't on the cards for many years. But now, it's everywhere, tucked into every second article, LinkedIn sermon and long-form X post that wants to sound groundbreaking but falls flat. It wasn't always like this. Outside of yellowing novel pages, em dashes, especially those without spaces on either side, were prevalent in prestige American texts. They belonged in literary-leaning publications like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Pitchfork… publications with writers and editors who know how to break rhythm with elegance for a readership that gets it. Now the em dash has gone corporate. The issue is not that it's going mainstream, but how it's being used. Blame the machine It's ChatGPT's fault. And that of all other large language models (LLMs) like Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. For better or worse, LLMs are widely used in writing today. But, while they can assist, most LLM-generated text lacks that personal touch. It reads broad and glossy. Emotionally neutral and safe. You can often tell when a piece of writing has been LLM generated, not just by its tone, but by its punctuation. The em dash appears like a glitch in the code, levitating where a comma, semicolon, colon or even just a space would've worked better. It's like narrative duct tape — functional but overused. And yet, humans are letting it slide. Or worse, they are copying the style without realising why. The popularity of AI in SA ChatGPT is the fifth-most visited website in South Africa, after Google, YouTube, Facebook and, sadly, Hollywoodbets. Globally, it received 4.7 billion visits in April alone, up 51% from just two months earlier. In the AI search space, ChatGPT now commands over 80% of the traffic. People are using it to write everything from school essays to corporate blogs and press releases. Financial challenges, rife in the media space all over the world, are pushing publications to quietly consider the use of AI-generated articles. I've heard the whispers and read the actual texts. One never knows the prompts people are feeding LLMs, but the output speaks volumes. Whole articles, captions and bios that sound templated. You can feel the generic thrum of machine-generated rhythm. Deeper than punctuation To me, as an emerging writer in the 2010s, the em dash was aspirational. My Lenovo didn't have the symbol on the keyboard, but my Mac made it easier, though still a two-key job. In my delusions, I felt the em dash elevated my writing and set it apart because em dashes were never common in South African writing. Echoing the New York Times style I admired, I'd open with anecdotal leads and pepper the body with em dashes, only to have them stripped out by sub-editors and replaced with spaced hyphens, en dashes or colons and commas. But today, it's a different story. This isn't to say an em dash is a sign of LLM-generated text. But in a South African text, it does make you pause. There are times when it's the only punctuation that truly works for cutting across a thought, or surprising the reader, but when you start seeing it everywhere, it becomes suspicious. And points not just to laziness, but no care. LLMs aren't writers. They're tools. With access to nearly the entire internet, they're brilliant at research, summarising, organising thoughts and even giving technical feedback. But relying on LLMs to write for you, no edits, no effort, is the plastic surgery of writing. 'Basically, AI is a very fancy autocomplete,' It generates responses by predicting the most likely next word based on training data, not by truly understanding meaning. Which means, if you are going to use it, edit. Start with the punctuation then move on to the other tells. First, the clause trio, a rhythm AI loves: three short, punchy phrases or words. Those are usually used to punctuate the 'it's not just …, it's a …' structured sentence. Next, the Oxford comma, a largely American habit, now cropping up in every other LinkedIn post and amapiano press release. Then there's the overly measured tone — serious, but generic. Works best for motivational speakers and, eh, life coaches. Even when humans write this way without the use of AI, sadly, the work just reads … suspect. So what now? Write like a human? Writers are starting to worry. There have been cases where AI filters flag human work as machine-written. X users told one writer to ditch the em dashes, colons and semi-colons altogether. It's Editors already have a list of blacklisted phrases. Now, that list includes the punctuation marks and indicators mentioned above — or your work may be dismissed as synthetic. Worse, when Which brings us to a bigger question: what is AI doing to writing? Experts argue that, outside the generic sentence-stitching, relying on LLMs is detrimental to our thinking and reasoning capacity. 'It turns you from an active seeker of information into a passive consumer of information and I don't know if, in the long term, that is a good shift for us to be making,' says Celia Ford, an American science journalist, in Ford admits that, through technological tools, humans have been doing a lot of 'cognitive off-loading'. She mentions calendar reminders, GPS and even the idea of writing stuff down instead of memorising it. But, there's a caveat. 'When we let LLMs write essays or code for us,' she says, 'we are giving up something that feels, at least to me, pretty central to humanness; critical thinking and creativity, and we are risking letting these tools think for us, instead of aiding us in our own thinking.' Always invite AI to the table However, despite the concerns, the fact is AI is not going anywhere. It may be bad for the environment, but so are fossil fuels and many other technologies we can't live without. In an era when publications are understaffed, leading to minimal time spent on editing drafts, I can't imagine working without Grammarly, which is still a form of AI. It doesn't write, it's not generative like LLMs, it assists, it refines what you've already put on the page. But sometimes it can suck the soul out of your writing. That's when the human brain should take over. But, overall, it helps improve the quality of your draft. Refusing to use AI at all, as noble as it might be, is backward and somewhat masochistic, but also on-brand for humans. All new technologies get criticised by purists. Guns were once seen as cowardly in combat. Cars were dismissed as loud and dangerous by horse riders. Even typewriters were accused of ruining handwriting. How about digitally produced music? We've come a long way. Mollick gets it. 'We have never built a generally applicable technology that can boost our intelligence,' he writes. 'Now humans have access to a tool that can emulate how we think and write, acting as a co‑intelligence to improve (or replace) our work.' He's not afraid of collaboration, however, and he embraces the machine and encourages us to do the same: 'Always invite AI to the table.' 'In field after field,' he writes, 'a human working with an AI co‑intelligence outperforms all but the best humans working without an AI.' Tech changes every art form Technology has transformed all major art forms. In electronic music, computers gave us hi-hats that rattle faster than any drummer could ever play, creating a texture musicians weren't familiar with. What is the world without trap music and EDM? In the 16th century, the camera obscura projected scenes onto a canvas, allowing artists to trace subjects, leading to more immersive art. CGI has made entire universes possible. Marvel's billion-dollar empire couldn't exist without it. Mark Zuckerberg recently said most Meta code will be handled by AI going forward. 'It can run tests, it can find issues, it will write higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already,' Zuck said in a podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel. Writing: What will AI bring? Maybe speed. Maybe a new kind of prose. Hopefully not just more em dashes in your feed, but a deeper shift in how we think on the page. That's only possible if the human stays in control. If we surrender the process completely, what's left is not writing, just passive copy and paste. But there are more efficient ways to use LLMs. 'It's not that the LLM is giving me the answers,' said David Perell in his visual essay The Ultimate Guide to Writing with AI, 'it's that the LLM is helping me ask good questions … like shining a spotlight in different corners of my brain and helping me find treasure boxes of insight I would've never found on my own.' Stacy Schiff, biographer of There are lines. Where they are drawn is deeply subjective. But, seeing no line at all should be collectively condemned.
Daily Mail
26-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Car-crash interview exposes the rotting hypocrisy at the heart of the modern Greens. Think kicking out the co-founder is bad? It's about to get a LOT worse: PVO
There's a certain irony in watching the PM trumpet his government's education credentials with a handwritten note that flunks basic punctuation.
Washington Post
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Readers critique The Post: Who — or what — is killing the semicolon?
Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers' grievances — pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week's Free for All letters. Mark Lasswell's June 30 op-ed, 'This punctuation mark is semi-dead. People have thoughts.,' was dot-on! He quoted Edgar Allan Poe as being ''mortified and vexed' by printers who substituted semicolons for the dashes in manuscripts.' Respectfully, Mr. Poe, there's a fine line between a dash and a semicolon. Next thing you know, they'll be eliminating the ellipsis … & annihilating the ampersand! Or heaven help us, abolishing alliterations! Please, please — we have bigger battles to embrace & engage; let the semi survive … Sandy Pugh, Vienna Perhaps the semicolon's loss of popularity over the past century has been compensated for by an increase in use of the dash, particularly the version known as the em dash (—). This form of punctuation is prominent in opinion pieces within The Post, to the extent that I wonder whether incentives are provided to encourage its use. I conducted quick tallies of dashes within the eight opinion pieces that appeared on my screen alongside (but not including) Lasswell's column. I found 59, far exceeding the number of semicolons. The 'winner' was Max Boot's column 'Iran's nuclear program is damaged — not 'obliterated,'' in which 17 dashes were wielded, exceeding the number of paragraphs. For Boot, enthusiasm for the dash extended even into the column's headline. George F. Will's column 'Exploding U.S. indebtedness makes a fiscal crisis almost inevitable' was the only one from this collection that presented its thoughts unassisted by a dash. According to Merriam-Webster, 'The em dash (—) can function like a comma, a colon, or parenthesis.' My opinion is that these elongated hyphens serve as distractions unless they are used sparingly. I would welcome a column similar to Lasswell's on reasons for the popularity of this form of punctuation. Amos Abbott, Blacksburg, Virginia The reports of the semicolon's semi-death are greatly exaggerated. In fact, it has evolved beyond the halls of grammar through embodied, communal praxis. On bodies, in journals and in the hearts of those who carry it as a symbol of survival, it has grown larger than a literary tool. It now serves as a widely recognized emblem for those who've lived through suicidality, depression and loss. Project Semicolon, begun in 2013, reframed the punctuation mark as metaphor: The sentence could have ended but didn't. For many, this is not clever literary ornamentation; it is the choice to continue. A pause made visible. A commitment made tangible. To miss the semicolon's cultural status is to overlook a vital chapter. Grammar evolves. So do symbols. What we are witnessing is not a disappearance but a rebirth — as an icon of meaning-making, of resilience and of collective reimagining. Nicole Oxendine, Severna Park Reporter Joe Heim got a rare early-morning laugh out of me in his June 20 Metro article, 'Eight-foot tall 'Dictator Approved' statue appears on Mall.' Heim contacted an anonymous person who said he had been part of a group that had worked on the poop sculpture that appeared last year. Heim asked Mystery Person whether he had anything to do with the new 'Dictator Approved' sculpture, but Mystery Person disavowed any connection. Diplomatically, Heim pressed, but Mystery Person declined to answer any more questions or agree to 'meet in an Arlington parking garage.' Life can be light in the morning amid all the bad news. Who knew? Thank you, Woodward and Bernstein — I mean, Heim. Joe Peluso, Rockville The June 11 editorial, 'Why Congress should investigate Biden's health,' must have been written by the Editorial Board's younger members. In composing the sentence 'Yet health risks typically multiply in people's later years,' those of us for whom 80 is history would have omitted the unnecessary adverb 'typically.' Robert Wallace, Reston The July 5 online column 'Miss Manners: Cash gift might insult grieving friend' included appallingly inappropriate and unkind advice. The letter writer asked whether it was appropriate to give an unemployed and newly widowed young woman cash instead of flowers. Miss Manners decided to take the opportunity to display her entitled sarcasm by writing that the widow would somehow feel insulted to receive cash, following up with 'Of course, if your friend immediately starts her own public fundraising platform, which she will undoubtedly do …' Though I'm delighted Miss Manners has apparently not found herself in the condition of poverty or profound loss, why make a disparaging musing about a widow she knows nothing about? Suzanne Morss, Seattle The writer is founder of Widows and Widowers of Alcoholics. I read with great interest the July 14 Style article 'After Texas floods, group aims to return small comforts.' As a senior citizen who still takes her stuffies to bed with her, reading about the Lost Stuffy Project moved me to tears. The effort to replace the dear stuffed animals, blankets and other comfort items lost by children in the flooding was the best news I had heard in months. Christine Brooks, Reston The June 30 front-page article 'Christmas in June is on schedule for 9-year-old,' on celebrating Christmas in June, was worth, itself, a full year's subscription. The outpouring of love and support by neighbors and beyond brought tears and memories. Early in our marriage, my husband and I lost our 4½-year-old son to leukemia. It was a tragedy no family should have to endure. I know many of us would have been happy to join in Kasey Zachmann's celebration. My granddaughter studying in New Zealand would have been happy to don her Buddy the Elf costume for Zachmann's parade. This event for a terminally ill little girl is proof enough that America never lost its greatness. Ann Houston, Silver Spring In phrases such as '[effect] owes as much to [cause X] as it does to [cause Y],' it should be obvious that X is the surprising or noteworthy cause and Y is the expected, unremarkable one. Yet I continue to see the opposite approach in The Post, including in the July 6 Sports article '3,000-K club adds Kershaw but is tougher to join now,' where the reporter wrote that 'reaching the hallowed 3,000-strikeout mark is a test as much of talent as it is of durability.' The reporter's wording got the message backward, because the point is that durability is increasingly rare among elite pitchers. Unless the style gods have issued a bizarre contrary decree about such phrases, I urge The Post to remind its writers and editors of their traditional structure. Perry Beider, Silver Spring 'Inking the capital, block by block,' the July 7 Metro Q&A with Gareth Fuller about his hand-drawn, hyper-detailed map of D.C., included the question 'What do you hope viewers take from your artwork?' Fuller has a lot of hopes for the work and what viewers can both get from and add to it, metaphorically speaking. But the article did not stick to the tenets of basic journalism. So readers don't know where the piece is being shown, when it will be on view or how to go see it. I see the reporter is an intern. Thus, the fault lies with the editors who are supposed to be mentoring this young woman in the formative stages of her career. And no kudos to her journalism school faculty, who have also sold her short. She's a good writer and will be a first-rate journalist — if her would-be guides step up. Joan Hartman Moore, Alexandria Gareth Fuller responds: I'm currently looking for a suitable partner to exhibit with. It would be brilliant to hang the work in a public space or institution ideally. The July 6 Travel article 'She lost her diamond at an airport. A crew of strangers helped search for it.' was amazing. I might be able to top it. Two decades ago, after browsing in the Annapolis Mall for several hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I got into my car around 5 to drive home. Upon placing my hands on the steering wheel, I noticed the setting on my ring where my diamond should have been was empty. My first thought was that I'd lost it forever, so I should just go home. But as I started driving, feeling tremendous sadness, I decided I could not give up that easily. I returned to the spot where I had parked, exited my car, and started looking at the ground and in my car. No diamond. I returned to the mall and reentered the many stores I had shopped in, even asking clerks whether a diamond had been turned in. They tried not to laugh. I checked pockets of clothing I had tried on, and I walked the full length of the mall, scouring the floor while retracing my steps. Finally, with about five minutes to 6, when the mall would close and the vacuum cleaners would do their work, I returned to the last store still open. I sat down in the seat where I had tried on shoes an hour or two earlier. I looked down at the carpeted floor and saw something twinkling back at me. With tears exploding in my eyes, I reached down to pick up my diamond. People around me looked on in sympathy, but I was too emotional to explain. Clearly, someone was looking out for me and guiding my hand. Peg McCloskey, Davidsonville Marc A. Thiessen is nearly unrelenting in his support of President Donald Trump, but he supports a rational, disciplined Trump who does not exist. In his July 11 op-ed, 'Watch Trump make good on his Ukraine promises,' Thiessen used the phrase 'Trump should' or a slight variant of it seven times! It's necessary to phrase it this way because Trump doesn't usually do the things Thiessen is praising him for. One non-hypothetical action that Thiessen gave Trump credit for — reversing a Pentagon pause in weapons deliveries to Ukraine — was necessary only because of reckless moves by his own administration. Tony Magliero, Hyattsville 'In birds, actress Lili Taylor sees a 'parallel universe,'' Sophia Nguyen's July 6 Book World review of 'Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing,' should strike a note for all of us. Birds are nearly ubiquitous, so travel for casual observation is not required. Taylor espouses 'lazy birding': finding a patch and waiting patiently. I think of myself as an incidental birdwatcher, sitting on my front porch watching the arrivals and departures of visitors to my standard-issue, standard-stocked feeder. Special events are surprise sightings of less common species. This year, it was a thrush, a variety I hadn't seen in years. I also put raisins on my porch railing for the catbirds. These are bold, nearly fearless, ravenous, dark creatures that fix you with their intense stare. Just sitting and watching them is as tranquilizing and mesmerizing as watching flames in a fireplace or waves at the beach. The continual turning of a kaleidoscope. Excepting the occasional taking of a dove by a red-tailed hawk, birding is a daily source of renewal. Try it; you'll like it. William A. McCollam, Fairfax Lobster bisque and foie gras on the International Space Station? Humans might be intelligent life forms, but we're far from compassionate ones. It's absurd that we can launch astronauts into orbit yet still cling to exploiting, abusing and killing Earth's other intelligent beings. And it's absurd that The Post would promote this practice by covering it in the July 8 news article 'An out-of-this-world menu for a French astronaut.' Lobsters are complex animals who use sophisticated signals to explore their surroundings. Ducks and geese are smart, social creatures: Ducks use vocalizations and body language to communicate, and geese mate for life and protect their families. And just like you and me, these animals feel pain. Foie gras is made from grotesquely enlarged livers of birds who are unnaturally force-fed. It's a practice so cruel that it's banned in many parts of the world. And lobsters' intricate nervous systems mean there's no humane way to kill them. Even in zero gravity, cruelty weighs heavy. If astronauts want to inspire the next generation, they should ditch the violence and show the world that ethical, sustainable, vegan food can thrive anywhere — even 250 miles above Earth. Scott Miller, Norfolk The writer is an author at the PETA Foundation. I was surprised to find the following sentence in the July 10 op-ed 'Emanuel's frustration with Democrats,' written by the extremely literate George F. Will: 'Before handing a diploma to a high school senior, the student had to hand over a letter of acceptance from a four-year college, a community college, an armed service or a vocational school.' Did Will really mean to say that the student handing the diploma (to another student? to the principal?) had to hand over a letter of acceptance? I doubt it. I think he meant to say: 'Before receiving a diploma, a high school senior had to hand over a letter of acceptance.' Frank Burgess, Washington Tim Cunningham's July 13 op-ed, 'Donald Trump is not a clown. I should know.,' cautioned against demeaning clowns — who for centuries 'have been uniting people in laughter, levity and creativity' — by classifying President Trump as one. 'Try 'buffoon,'' Cunningham advised. He could have invoked George F. Will's observation — in his June 2, 2020, op-ed, 'Four more years of this?' — that Trump, 'this weak person's idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.' Steven T. Corneliussen, Poquoson, Virginia
Washington Post
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
This punctuation mark is semi-dead. People have thoughts.
LONDON — Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a 'Seinfeld' plotline saw Elaine's new romance with a writer blow up because he didn't share her enthusiasm. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the anti-exclam brigade, famously said using them is 'like laughing at your own joke.'
Telegraph
27-06-2025
- General
- Telegraph
How using a full stop could give away your age
Using a full stop in texts could be giving away your age, an expert has suggested. Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert, said young people – aged from 13 to 28 – were rewriting the rules to 'shift' the meaning of inverted commas, quotation marks, ellipses, full stops and the dash. Using a full stop could actually be conveying a blunt tone, which Generation Z avoida, she told The Telegraph. Traditional usage of various punctuation marks has now been upended, with quotation marks used to imply irony or sarcasm rather than speech and full stops used to convey passive-aggressive bluntness instead of the neutral sentence ender. Meanwhile, ellipses are used to suggest awkwardness or hesitation and commas and dashes repurposed to signal emphasis and to mimic spoken language rather than a pause in the sentence. Ms Wolf cited writers' varying approaches to punctuation use, such as James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy, and their minimal use of punctuation to 'set a particular tone'. 'It's only natural, then, for contemporary writers to embrace this evolving function of punctuation and use it to convey more than just a pause or breath in a sentence,' she added. The language expert also pushed back on the idea that these practices are eroding grammar, instead arguing that it can be more 'emotionally precise'. It comes after it was revealed the semicolon could be dying out after its use has more than halved in two decades, according to language app Babbel. Young people who do not know how to use semicolons were shown as being behind the decline. Ms Wolf added that Gen Z is one of the 'main forces behind this shift in punctuation use' after they 'mainstreamed' new meanings on social media, but claimed it does not signal grammar is 'being destroyed'. She explained that having grown up largely on digital platforms, young people need to use punctuation 'as a way to convey the intended tone of a written short-form message when the tone may not be obvious'. 'Social media is, without question, the main driver behind this evolution,' Ms Wolf continued. 'Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, X and messaging apps have shaped a kind of informal digital writing style that prioritises tone, brevity, and relatability. 'In these spaces, punctuation becomes a crucial stand-in for the cues we'd normally get from tone of voice or facial expression.' She said: 'Grammar isn't being destroyed; it's being stretched to fit new modes of communication. For example, using quotation marks for sarcasm and ellipses for uncertainty 'mirrors real speech more closely' and marks an 'intuitive adaptation to digital life'. Ms Wolf added: 'What might be considered 'wrong' by traditional grammar standards can actually be emotionally precise.'
