How ChatGPT Made My Writing Style 'Suspicious' — A Love Letter to the Em-Dash
I remember how poetic I used to be—how the words would cascade and curl like smoke from some pretentious literary cigarette 🚬—but it wasn't efficient or apt. It wasn't honest. It felt like adding another layer of ambiguity to who I currently was: layers upon layers of metaphor and accidental wordplay that only sprinkled in fantastical aesthetics, like glitter on a wound that didn't need decorating. ✨
It was quite pretentious.
Unreal.
Fake.
But what was true—what remains true—was my love for em-dashes. I curse AI for loving them too ⚪, but hey, maybe great minds do think alike (or maybe we're all just pretentious in different fonts).
I was a copyeditor by profession five years before ChatGPT blurted out its first words into the void 💬, and that was when I got heavily introduced to punctuation—those beautiful little architectural decisions that hold language together. I've forgotten almost everything from that profession except for em-dashes. I loved them so much. Still do.
They're long and slender and work like my second-favorite punctuation mark: the parentheses (see what I did there?). They create space—breathing room—pause where a comma feels too brief and a period too final.
I'm just gonna say fuck it 🖕 to those who think AI can only be the one to love the em-dash. You can't define how I write or what I love with your rigid, closed minds.
This is mine. These dashes—my dashes—belong to me. 💛
P.S. I do use AI for a variety of things. I just don't like it when people say that the telltale signs for using it are the em-dashes.