Obsessed with the Em Dash Debate
Hello there, my dearest digital friends! How’s life?
Have you ever realized that there’s so much more to your life than keeping up with your author blog every few weeks? I have – to the tune of almost six effing months! Whoops.
There are myriad reasons I have not posted here for some time…
- Marketing and promoting my “new” top-selling book Life Sucks – available on Amazon now.
- Battling a patch of toe fungus clinging to my middle-left toe like the cordyceps in The Last of Us.
- Grieving my dead dad — Jimmy “Seamus” Conway, patriarch of Clan Conway — who passed in the hospital on July 6.
- Waging war to recover my ten-year Twitter/X account after some crypto dickhead hacked it. Still unresolved. Thanks for sucking, Twitter/X. And Elon, for being such a pseudo-human.
- But most of all? I’ve been obsessed with the ongoing debate over the em dash.
For those of you hiding in some grammatical hideyhole—the em dash — the longest of them all – not to be confused with the en dash – the mid-sized one – or the humble hyphen – the little dash your QWERTY keyboard proudly displays.
And the only sort of dash I ever knew existed… before the controversy!
What’s the Controversy, PS?
GREAT question.
Apparently, in our literary-nerd circle, some wannabe writers — who frankly couldn’t write their way out of a wet paper bag — have been using ChatGPT to write for them.
Cue the disgusted GASP! AI is writing for humans!
In my particular ninth circle of grammatical hell, modern poetry, AI is using em dashes in abundance. And this has signaled to some editors and high-brow dash-snobs that (bad) writers are using AI to produce their work and then claim it as exclusively their own.
WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? The horror.
As if it weren’t already hard enough for any of us self-serious artists to get published or taken even more seriously by the establishment Literati! Now we must endure the indignity of our brilliance being scrutinized further for potentially using AI in our writing?
Fuuuuuccckkkkk.
Oh, it’s even worse…
Because now, friends, every editor with a magnifying glass and a superiority complex believes they can spot an AI poem by counting how many em dashes it flaunts.
One too many — guilty.
Two — definitely Skynet.
Three — straight to the digital gallows.
Apparently, the mere whiff of that long, glorious line is enough to brand a human writer as a silicon fraud. Never mind that Emily Dickinson practically wrote her entire spiritual autobiography between dashes. Never mind that an em dash is sometimes the only punctuation with the courage to hold a thought that can’t decide whether to live or die.
But now?
The dash is evidence.
A crime scene.
And I — poor mortal that I am — must defend my punctuation’s honor.
Do I stand before the tribunal and cry, “It was I who dashed, not the machine!”? Do I strip my poems of their rhythmic lifelines just to appease the grammar gods?
If this is what literary purity has become, maybe the robots deserve the future after all.
The Last Dash (for now)
So here I am, standing knee-deep in poetic purgatory, clutching my em dashes like contraband. The editors are sharpening their red pens; the bots are perfecting irony; and I’m just a guy trying to mourn his dad, cure his fungus, and maybe—just maybe—write something beautiful without being accused of digital sorcery.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been gone so long. Grief, travel, absurdity, and the faint terror that even punctuation has turned political. Sometimes it’s easier to stay silent than risk being mistaken for code.
But absence, like an em dash, isn’t an ending—it’s a pause. A breath. A chance to gather what still matters before the next sentence begins.
So if I disappear again, don’t worry. I’m probably out there somewhere, arguing with algorithms, missing my father, or trying to remember why writing ever felt holy in the first place.
Until then—well—see you on the next post.
Assuming the robots don’t beat me to it.