The em dash (—) has always been around, but lately it feels like it is everywhere. Scroll through online articles, blog posts, or even AI-generated text, and you will see the same pattern: sentences stitched together with em dashes. What was once an occasional stylistic choice has become a kind of overused crutch.

A Giveaway of AI Writing

Many readers now point to the em dash as a subtle fingerprint of ChatGPT and other language models. The reason is simple. AI has absorbed massive amounts of human writing, and in doing so it seems to have learned to lean heavily on this mark. Where humans might choose a comma or a period, AI often drops in an em dash. The result is a flow that feels polished, but also a little too generic.

This doesn’t mean every em dash signals AI authorship. Some people use the mark naturally, and others may only rely on AI to polish a draft. Still, when a piece of writing is full of them, it raises eyebrows.

A Good Practice for Writers

If you want your work to sound like your own voice, it’s worth paying attention. One simple practice is to scan your text and cut out excess em dashes. Even better, if you are using a tool like ChatGPT, you can add a line to your prompt: “Do not use the em dash.” This forces the writing to lean on more natural punctuation.

The em dash isn’t bad in itself, but its current overuse has made it a tell. If clarity and authenticity matter to you, avoid letting it dominate your style.