Long Live The Em Dash (And Emily Dickinson)

Amongst the many social media posts complaining about how 'ChatGPT has ruined the em dash,' author Christina Garnett offered a different perspective that got me thinking about how a communicator's job is to communicate well - everything else is just noise.

If you can’t read it, it says, “That’s not ChatGPT’s em dash. It’s Emily Dickinson’s.”

Emily Dickinson was a master communicator. She owned the em dash. Why talk about artificial intelligence writing em dashes when we could revisit Dickinson’s use?

Full disclosure that we should definitely get out of the way: I’ve never been a confident em dash user. I think it’s for the same reasons I’m scared of semi colons. I admire other people who use them, but I never see an em dash or a semi colon when I talk in my head. I see parentheticals (sometimes I just have to, you know, off-to-the-side, kind of tell you something) and - sometimes - I see the attention-pause-to-grab via my beloved floating hyphen. But, I just don’t hear em dashes in my inner voice.

Emily Dickinson definitely spoke and saw and felt her em dashes. They were part of her inner monologue somehow. This is the heart of what Christina scratched at for me.

When I get down into it, I think em dashes always felt a little fancier than my abilities. Maybe it was the mom and grandma English teachers I grew up around. They’d tell me how I was using them wrong, if I was, and knowing there were rules to such tools, I developed my own writing tics.

And this is the core of what Emily Dickinson knew, that Christina Garnett’s post is reminding us.

Express what you want to express, on your terms, and in your words.

If your jam is em dashes, do it! Lean in. So what if a social media script writing LLM is making everybody look like you. You can still sound like you. You just have to put the effort in.

Writing is hard. Any tool that helps you communicate authentically is fair game. Most people will use AI for shortcuts, but others will use it to make art.

I've had to train my AI editor to stop suggesting em dashes (I even have a prompt in Claude that says “knock that em dash stuff off, it's not my style”). But others can and should celebrate using them - if it's your style, keep it in!

The De La Soul line I can’t stop returning to goes, “My Art is Official while you're art-ificial.” It applies here too. Only you can make your writing into art. Whether others recognize it as art depends on how well you communicate that feeling to them—with or without the em dashes. (Did I use it right? I’m scared. I had to use one on my own though, so there goes!)

As a bonus, I shared this image on social media as a reminder to embrace Art Official Intelligence. Writing this post, I’m extra inclined to capture it here too. And, not just because it’s Emily Dickinson either, you really want to read this one closely.

In case the image doesn’t show up, here’s the text (via a book called Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, that I found a used copy of in a Chicago book store that my wife took me to).

Whatever you do with AI, never forget to be a merchant of grace who never reduces humanity to a dollar figure alone. Dickinson is here to remind us that authentic expression matters more than market trends, whether those trends involve traditional publishing or AI writing patterns.

Just communicate well and make art worthy of sharing.

Obligatory (bonus points, the idea that Pos’ verse starts off with a twist on Run DMC? It almost makes this metaphor work too well):