How I Learned the Em-Dash Wasn’t the Villain

I used to think the em dash was a red flag. Not in a literary sense, but in a “your robot forgot to sound like you” kind of way. If someone who usually types like they’re speed-running a group chat suddenly drops a beautifully structured paragraph with “em dash” smack in the middle, I get suspicious. Like, fr fr, no cap. That is not how they write.

It is like one of your mates showing up to poker night in a tuxedo: impressive, but wildly out of character.

Then Rae Repanshek chimed in and reminded me that some people really do write that way. They have spent thousands of hours honing their craft, not squeezing out a post between preschool pickup and a third reheated coffee.

So I revisited my hypothesis. The real signal is not the fancy punctuation; it is a sudden jump in writing quality that feels off-brand. When someone who normally texts in lowercase drops a four-paragraph essay that reads like it came from The Atlantic, you start to wonder.

I get the temptation. As a Dad with a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, carving out writing time is tough. I have absolutely considered spinning up a bot to post for me while I wrangle bedtime and forgotten lunchboxes.

But I do not, because authenticity matters. If I share something, I want it to be mine.

LLMs help me edit, clarify, and occasionally tell me when a sentence makes zero sense. That is a perfect use case. The ideas and the voice, though? Those stay human.

Automate the toil. Keep the story real.